By Shannon Williams
Christmas is about family and friends, it is the best part of the whole season, being with those you love. It is also, for many of us, about Tradition. I have more traditions around Christmas that anything else I do or take part in, and I have several activities or events that I have taken part in for well over 30 years, but those Christmas traditions go back further than that.

I have early memories of going to my Girl Scout (Brownie) meetings and making Christmas gifts for your family. We would work and work each meeting, starting several months ahead to get our gifts just right. It was heartbreaking at times, when something would happen to the project as you were working on it. Each year, I love to take part in some sort of art and craft activities and I have a house full of many years of these projects. I hate it when I have to part with one, as it has just has outlived its life, usually by several years. I have two small white angels that I made in a ceramic class in college. Each year, I pull them out and they have a place of honor in the display. For years, I had an angel made from a tomato’s cage and also one using a mop head. That was way before Pinterest and you had to look and look for a craft project that you could do or find a class to help you along. I made over 15 mosaic crosses one year, using old china that had seen better days. It was about the time that my son started to bring art and craft gifts home that I stopped trying to make most of the gifts. I would love to see how many of those projects my siblings still have! (they like it much better when I just bake for them LOL).

A friend from high school, who lives in Alvin, had been trying to get me to go to a class that you use broken pieces of glass and many other things and glue them on a form. I never could make time for it, but promised I would try it before the end of the year. I made good on my promise, and last Friday spent the afternoon having a whole lot of fun! My cousin is in town while the hubby is off hunting, so I needed something fun for us to do and off we went to “The Shard Yard’  in Friendswood. They take reclaimed glass and “fuse it” with your creativity and a 3-dimensional piece of art is born. There were four of us and we each decided on a project; two of us did Christmas items (a tree and a snowman) while the other two went with animals, doing a cat and a turtle. For the next several hours, we worked on our pieces, talked and just enjoyed an afternoon with NO STRESS! I was able to create a Christmas tree, using so many different objects and was pleased with the end result. I have already decided on several other projects I want to attempt. They take you step by step, so it does not get overwhelming and all four of us really felt like we had created something we were proud of!

The next day it was time to channel my inner Willy Wonka and start the annual “Candy Making Day”. Since I left the West Texas Area, I have had to have someone pinch hit to help me the candy making. That was one of the reasons my cousin came and maybe one of the reasons that hubby decided to leave town! We chopped, dipped, stirred and washed dishes all the while getting covered in chocolate, but at the end of the day we had some very tasty treats to mail off to family and friends along with some for us to enjoy.

Christmas is a time to take part in many things that we don’t usually make time for during the year. I wish, we would do better at not over doing it at Christmas and working to keep a little bit of Christmas all year long.

[Dec-7-2021]