Feeling a dearth of burlap, foxes, chevrons, fairy lights, and mason jar lids in my life, I went on Pinterest to see what was happenin’.
I always start out with wholesome intentions, sincerely searching for neat DIY ideas. I even bought a set of plain glass balls, and I intend to spray paint them, using tiny paper snowflakes as stencils. As stencils! It is going to be pretty. Tell me it’s going to be pretty!
I start out, I say, with good intentions, looking for ideas that we will enjoy trying out; but I always end up calling my husband over for backup to help me mock stuff more thoroughly.
Because son, there is some stupid shit out there.
For your convenience, I’ve organized my thoughts into some basic rules to help you identify when you’ve slipped past DIY and landed smack in the middle of WTF, by which I obviously mean Where’s the Fphrenologist to feel your lumpy head and figure out what would impel you to follow through with some of these hideously inexcusable projects?
Things that would bring shame to hobos. Okay, so we all have failed crafts and stupid crafts and crafts that don’t turn out so great. That is fine. I have a number of them displayed around my house, because I have low standards.
But when I do come up with something lousy, I do not then use an expensive camera to take luxe photos of it and offer tutorials for how to recreate it in your own home. And not only because it didn’t occur to me! It’s because when you take a sweater and cut it up into heart shapes and then stick a paper clip through it, that’s not a cozy winter ornament. That’s garbage.
When kids make things that turn out a little rough and wobbly, that’s cute. When disabled people make things that are kind of naive and clunky, your heart is allowed to melt. But functioning adults are not allowed to just churn out crap and call it “adorable” just because it looks bad! Bad is bad! It’s not twee or offbeat or funky! It’s just bad! Bad bad bad!
(If you want to live a little, browse around in this chick’s site. Do not miss the confetti updo, which, the tutorial will instruct you, can be achieved by braiding your hair and then using your head to clean under the couch. In another spot, she instructs you to roast a turkey, cram some pom poms up its ass, and call it “festive feast.” I BET IT IS.)
Craft projects that require you spend $18 on a hobby store fake version of something people used to throw out back once the hogs were done with them. You know it must be within ten days of a major American holiday when local message boards are full of frantic pleas: Does anyone know where I can find wooden pallets? No, honey, nobody knows, because they have all been painted like terrible flags for the fourth of July, hung on the walls of pretentious condos for terrible wine racks, transformed into terrible herb planters in the front yards of people who wouldn’t know what to do with basil if grew with instructions right on the leaves, or tacked together by someone’s gloomy husband who would be perfectly willing to shell out cash for an actual, real, non-wobbly coffee table that doesn’t give you splinters, but now we have to spend all Thursday night sanding, and the Raiders are playing, too.
Leave pallets alone. Also milk bottles, mason jars, pre-weathered planks, and fruit crates. Gosh.
When you have a display, rather than decorations. Stores put up holiday displays. Businesses put up holiday displays. School children get together and work on a nice display together. But why are we doing this as individuals living in our homes? Why do we buy three shrink-wrapped bales of disinfected hay upon which to prop up some easily-identifiable symbols of the current holiday season in a studiously asymmetrical fashion, and set it up just to the left of the entrance to your home, and then forbid the children to play in the front yard because you’re trying to make it look homey with all those corn stalks you bought for eleven bucks a bunch? It’s your house, and you’re supposed to be living in it, not marketing it.
A small-scale rendition of this trend is when you take perfectly good stand-alone ornaments and tag them with keywords designed to snag maximum pageviews. You know what I mean: You have five glass balls in tasteful blue and silver, and that’s fine, but then you have to buy a special glass-writing marker and label each one with a Certified Holiday Word (without upper case letters or punctuation, of course, because we are having fun!). “Jingle” says one. “Merry,” explains another. “Star,” posits a third.
What? What? What is this for? This is stupid. If you like jingling so much, maybe use a bell, eh, smartacus? This is one of those things that people only do because other people are doing it, so it seems normal and cute and pretty, but it’s not. It’s stupid and it’s making the word stupider.
Subset: those astronomically smug, oversized wall decals that literally spell out exactly what kind of family you are. “WE DO LOVE! WE DO MESSY! WE DO OOPSIE WOOPSIE DOO ON THE REGULAR! WE SHINE FULL TIME! LOOK AT MY WHITE TEETH! I DEMAND A GOLD MEDAL FOR NOT FLIPPING OUT WHEN CARTER DROPS A CRACKER ON THE CARPET! CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE YOU GET TO BE FRIENDS WITH US!” No, I can’t. Please give me my coat back; I really must be going. I think I left my humidifier running, and the cats are going to get all waterlogged.
Yeah, yeah, I know, they’re not there for guests. They’re there for the actual family, to remind them of their own ideals. Except they’re not. They’re totally there to impress people, along the lines of those “Another family for peace” bumper stickers. I’m going to start my own auto insurance company just to design a rider specifically to cover people who deliberately rear-end another family for peace.
Inedible food ornaments. This may just be a hangover from some stinging childhood disappointment, but I feel like it’s bad form to fill the house with marvellous scents and then not get to chew on anything. Gingerbread cookies? Those are for eating. Applesauce is also for eating, and not for compressing into little weird brick stars and hearts that only look like non-poop if you tell people, “Those are made of applesauce, you know!” I’ll make an exception for clove oranges, because they really are pretty, and they have a venerable past. But no more dried applesauce poop. It doesn’t make me mad, it just makes me sad. I like applesauce.
Complete non-ornaments that just stare baldly at you, daring you to wonder if this is, like, the lost and found shelf, or what. Skis, ice skates, sleds, bicycles, wagons, whatever. You are not TGIFridays, nor were meant to be. Just because you manage to hang it on your wall, that doesn’t magically transform them into decor. This offends my thrifty heart, and it also violates the whole “decoration vs. display” rule.
Now, if you’re trying to sell me on the idea that industrial design can be beautiful, that is one thing. I will actually go to a museum and look carefully at a very good toilet or a telephone or a circuit board, because I like design. But that is not what is going on here. What is going on here is that some deranged housewife gets it into her head that anything that is no longer for sale at full price at Bed, Bath and So Forth must be automatically nostalgic, and therefore decorative. My only comfort is that deranged people are bad at hanging stuff, so it will probably fall down at some point and hit somebody. Kapow! Where’s your nostalgia now?
Things made out of books. Okay, so if the book was going to be destroyed anyway, that’s fine. But the thing that gets me is “She loves books so much, she made a whole chair out of them!” Hey, that’s great. I’m entirely blown away with your thorough grasp of the purpose of the written word! Or maybe you love books so much that you cut them up into bits and torture them into a gluey diorama depicting a scene from that book, that’s how much you love books!
Super duper. Remind me not to let you babysit my kids. Yes, I know you said you love kids. I heard you.
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In closing: Yes, I write things like this because I am a bitter, unhappy person who finds fulfillment in criticizing others, even though their behavior in no way impacts my life. Please pray for me.
Yes, mason jars are still a thing, still. I checked.
You are bitter, unhappy and petty in a healthy way. Whomever would abuse books in that way, I just can’t even…I laughed my bum off until I saw those pictures. Now that is just wrong.
I used to use mason jars as drinking glasses for years. After my partner and (especially) my son couldn’t stop laughing their asses off at the sight of it, I finally stopped. I’m thinking of going back to them, because when they break I can get an endless supply. Clever, no?
Agree on all counts! Especially the mason jars thing. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love mason jars for storing pantry staples, but mason jars are not drinking glasses, as half my friends seem to think. They’re shaped absolutely wrong for drinking out of – you have to tip your head backwards at an angle of 120 degrees or so to actually drink out of them, plus the thick, threaded edge is awkward and unpleasant to drink out of. And they’re not even cheaper than regular old drinking glasses. Pinterest has much to answer for!
Those sweater ornaments… I can’t even! If you have an old sweater that you don’t want to wear anymore a much better use would be to give it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army or if you knit/crochet and you’re really feeling ambitious, unravel it and reuse the yarn. (Instructions here, for those with more ambition than me: http://www.howtospinyarn.com/blog/2015/7/6/the-original-how-to-unravel-a-sweater-to-recycle-yarn-tutorial )
I love this on so many levels. 😀
When house hunting a few years ago, I saw one that had one of those decals over the master bed. It said “No Excuses.”
I completely agree with you! I especially have anger at the use of books as construction materials.
And those sappy signs ‘we do blah blah blah’. Make me want to vomit.
Simcha,I know you do speaking engagements. do you do birthday parties?
For adults?
please come to mine. I’m a libra.
Mason jars are good for one thing, namely, completing this joke:
“Am I Catholic? I’m so Catholic, I wouldn’t use a … “
A local talk show in my area calls the segment of his show “more cheap crap,” where he features someone making worthless, stupid things out of garbage. I agree
The repurposed-books thing drives me nuts. I once saw a show that gave instructions for making a faux bookshelf from plywood, wooden trim, and the sawed-off spines of old books. How is this better than an actual bookshelf with books one can read?
My first thought was, if you have a safe you want to hide, or a panic room… that’d be perfect.
(Probably you found that on the Crafty Paranoiacs Pinterest page.)
That would be a different show entirely! This was just a big thingie you leaned against the wall.
Equally hilarious is what the BBC Food section thinks I can make with/for my kids. Multi-step things with piping bags and expensive fondant (and you make it with them too.). Whoever wrote these recipes must only have fur babies
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/christmas-kids
Well, if you’re bitter and unhappy then so am I. Because I found this hilarious. And liberating. (You mean I’m not violating a federal law if I don’t do crafts at Christmas? Hooray!)