Top tips for a crafty Christmas

I might have been a preschool teacher in another life. Trouble is, it involves too many preschoolers in close proximity for too many hours of the day, and these days, too much filling in of forms and assessing which child has mastered which skill and when. Don’t get me started. But the little hint that gives me away is this: I love pottering about doing crafty-type things with small children. Actually, I love doing them without small children, but I didn’t know that until I had small children. Now I have small children, they are the props which make it possible for me to fiddle around with cotton wool, foam shapes and glue, without feeling silly. Of course now I’m in America, I could take up scrapbooking, which would probably fill the need, nurture the talent, help me express whatever creativity lurks behind the enjoyment of glue, shapes, googly eyes and pom-poms, but I can’t quite see the point of scrapbooking (sorry, all you dedicated scrapbookers out there), and I do have at least a few years left of small children before I have to turn my pottering about into something more credible. Maybe by then the phase will have passed.

Now don’t build me up into some kind of craft supermum here (I know you were about to…) I don’t hover round the kitchen table, sticky backed plastic in hand and clever ideas from the internet in head. My house isn’t filled with cute and kitsch home-made items that are both attractive and useful. It’s not a frequently-indulged pleasure, and when it is indulged, the result is some mournful object that hangs around on the side somewhere, until I judge that no-one except me will notice or be sad if it transferred to the trash.

Christmas is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself. I have a couple of books of beautiful craft projects for the season, so I flick through those. I always get put off by the words 'oven baked clay' though. Do people really know how to handle oven baked clay? I don’t. Sounds difficult. No. Trust me. There are only two things you need for Christmas crafts. Glitter and enthusiasm. That’s it. Simple, you see. Glitter and enthusiasm.

The glitter is easy. These days you can buy it in glue, which means it’s less messy. That, in my opinion, defeats half the purpose. I like the old stuff, in tubes, which you sprinkle daintily over your glue patterns, until the lid insert falls out and the whole tube empties in a great pile. You won’t be vacuuming glitter out of your carpet till September if you use the glitter glue, which would mean you missed half the fun. For me, glitter and sparkle has always been inseparably part of Christmas, but having a daughter has been a challenge to that. The inevitable pink that invades one’s life – the hospital pretty much delivers it along with the baby - is all too often accompanied by sparkle. ‘Pink and sparkly’ have become a classic duo, similar to ‘warm and cosy’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘safe and sound’, ‘gin and tonic’. I’m not sure what you can do about that, really, except just use ever more copious amounts of glitter at Christmas time, and add it to the list of parental ‘when I was a child’ laments, along with out of season strawberries and having to eat up your food even if you didn’t like it.

You have to dig a bit deeper for the enthusiasm, but we all have a little Joyce Grenfell in us somewhere. You just need to brush up a bit of vocabulary. In America, this is easy, because (as well as the trusty ‘good jahb’), you can use ‘ahsome’ for every eventuality. For emphasis, you can say ‘totally ahsome’, but usually just good old ‘ahsome’ will do, especially if you add a bit of extra ‘aah’ to it. In England, we say ‘spiffing’ a lot at this time of year, supported by ‘splendid’ and ‘top notch’ (British readers, what ho, back me up on this one).

The other failsafe enthusiasm-generator is the Christmas CD. I’m not talking carols from King’s College Cambridge, or pop classics by the original artists. I’m talking Jingle Bell Rock or Fifty Festive Favourites. It’ll have unadventurous bass lines and a relentlessly annoying drum beat, it’ll have children singing out of tune and twee breathy whispered Christmas greetings, it’ll contain irritating mistakes (ours has “deck the halls with bows of holly”), but you know you’ll love it deep down.

The rest is easy. You just cut out shapes, and put lots of glitter on them. You can do snowflakes (white paper, easy), or reindeer (brown paper, might need a bit of advance shopping, or rummaging through the trash for an old brown envelope), or Santa (red paper, cotton wool), or a stocking (come now, even the most creatively challenged of us can cut out a stocking shape). See, it’s easy. You just have to remember that this is not an occasion when less is more. More glitter is more.

The final stage is to put up the decorations. Now there are some people whose artistic sensibilities may be offended at this point. If your house looks like something out of Country Living magazine, you may want to debate this suggestion, but come on, it’s only 12 days, and what are you afraid of? Even if the neighbours come round, what are they doing to say? At best, nothing, and at worst something along the lines of “oh, these are very… um… festive, aren’t they?” You may even enjoy watching them pause and struggle for the right word (should have thought the whole sentence out before beginning it). No-one is going to remark “your children don’t have very good fine motor skills do they?” or “what a pity your creative urges weren’t adequately satisfied by three experiences of childbirth”. You have nothing to fear in polite society, and you will make your children happy. What more could you want?