One of my favorite parts of Christmas has always been the Advent Calendar. When I was a little girl we always had one of the German ones with the German village covered with glittery snow. While we got a new calendar each year they were similar and the 24th was always a picture of the nativity.
I was a young mother when I became aware of the Scandinavian advent calendars with their little rings to tie presents to. I made my own cross stitch version and each year I tied small presents wrapped in red and green tissue paper and tied with contrasting ribbons. I alternated red ribbons with green and my daughters took turns opening the small gifts. There were always 4 candy canes each and other small stocking stuffer like gifts. The 24th was always a nativity ornament for the family ( so of course we have quite a collection of those).
When my oldest daughter went to college, I began attaching small numbers to the wrapped presents and sent them off to her. I sent a box to my niece at boarding school too and she said that they made getting up on those dark December days much easier. Both reported that everyone in their dorms got excited to see what they had gotten each day.
I have continued to wrap the little presents for my daughters even though they are grown now but my oldest daughter mentioned a few years ago that the fact that you were supposed to open a present each day was more stressful than fun for her so I came up with a new idea for her – a stress free secular advent calendar! She doesn’t have to open one each day – there are four bags with 4 – 5 wrapped presents in each bag. Stapled to the first bag is “You better watch out”, to the second bag “You better not cry” to the third “You better not pout, I’m telling you why” and to the fourth one, of course, “Santa Claus is coming to town.” I still imagined that she would open one gift a day so I was shocked when she said she had opened all the gifts in one bag on the same day. “Hey”, she said, “I thought the whole point of this new way was that there were no rules.” No rules but still a tradition that works for her!
Yesterday I went to an open studio and holiday sale. Perhaps because I currently have a small collection of the bottle tops from what I call packages of goo (squeezable fruit and vegetables for kids) in my purse, I was captivated by Sally Curcio’s Bottle Caps assemblage. When I read the accompanying text, I was even more captivated by her description of the piece and her musings on collecting:
The installation “Bottle Caps” consists of over 1400 bottle caps that were collected from friends, anonymous donations, my trash and from visits to the recycling center. The bottle caps are glued to a 6’ x 10’ array of panels.
After their short functional life, bottle caps become garbage. This work resurrects these throw-aways as an artistic medium. The work engages in the most basic and powerful trick of magic and religion: transubstantiation.
This assemblage attempts to evoke our innate fascination with categorizing and collecting, and our bent to be connoisseurs. This collection comically summons this impulse into action. The work offers, in a self consciously naïve way, the self-satisfaction of collecting a “complete” or “large” set of objects, and the need for recognition in publicly displaying this triumph. The process of collecting, organizing, and display is a ritual that attempts to create an oasis of certainty, order, and self-identity.
This composition deliberately confronts the observer with a kind of alien and obsessive attention to precision and order suggesting an unconscious urgency. This translates positively into art that evokes the simplicity and “cleanliness” of minimalism, the brightness of op art, and the innocence of folk art. The sundry shapes and patterns are simple and satisfying, the colors are bright, the format neat, and the materials familiar and everyday, albeit re-contextualized. With this work I try to speak of our perpetual drive to somehow, in some way, perhaps even an outlandish way, try to take control and make sense of things.
I began collecting pictures of suns with faces when I was a teenager. My parents took us to a restaurant in New York called La Fonda Del Sol where I remember really enjoying a drink with a candied coffee bean on top. I also loved the pictures of suns and I hung the ones from the matchbooks on my cork bulletin board. Pretty soon the whole bulletin board became the “Sun Board”. I added more cork boards and more pictures of suns cut from magazines, newspapers, cards, boxes, paper plates, in fact of anything made of paper – one is from a bag of potatoes. When I moved to an apartment the cork boards came with me and moved with me from Buffalo to Denver to Massachusetts. My paper collection expanded and now the original paper ones are in a filing cabinet in the file called suns and I have ceramic, metal, papermache, plaster and glass suns hanging in my windows and on my walls both outside and in my downstairs bathroom and dining room. Several years ago, I found out that the designer of the restaurant that started my fascination with suns was a famous designer and folk art collector named Alexander Girard and that there was a whole wing of his folk art at the International Folk Art Museum of Santa Fe. As soon as I found out about it, we planned a trip to Santa Fe. I was not disappointed! See the link below.
A Day of the Dead Skeleton and card, the crocheted skull and the needle felted skull (lower right), and a few more ornaments
Every year we go to the woods to find a fallen branch, bring it in, hang it in front of a window and decorate it with our fall decorations which include:
jack o lanterns – 2 glass ornaments (traditional Christmas ornaments) and a pumpkin person made of pipe cleaners and a paper jack o lantern head reproduced from a Martha Stewart magazine a few years ago.
a scarecrow or harvest figure – This came on a stick and was meant to be stuck in a plant but I removed the stick and added a hook.
fruit – apples (wooden, ceramic, silk thread), a pomegranate, and a pair of wooden cherries.
nuts – a glass walnut, a glass chestnut and many many acorns – many glass, felted, beaded, ceramic. a Patience Brewster acorn person, a tiny carved wooden acorn bird feeder, and metal. This year I added some glass bead acorns I bought from WhysperFairy.com. She glued acorn tops to faceted beads, I added fishing line loops so I could hang them on the tree.
leaves of many varieties made of metal, fabric, felt, wood, traditional glass ornaments, stained glass and plastic that looks like stained glass. Two with faces!
pine cones – many traditional glass ornaments ones, a straw one and a wooden one from Germany, some I made with cut felt and beads.
devils – one I made of cut felt and a devil black cat ornament.
black cats – in addition to the devil one a small ceramic one and a pipe cleaner one from the same Martha Stewart article as the pumpkin one and a cut felt vintage one (with a crazy smile).
skulls and skeletons – Day of the Dead tin and wooden skeletons, a Day of the Dead head and a Day of the Dead dressed figure, a day of the Dead skeleton mermaid, a cut felt skull I made, a needle felted skeleton I made, a paper day of the Dead skull I made, and a crocheted skull I bought at Sacred Art in Chicago.
crows – one made of pompoms with a very cute hat, and a cut felt one
owls – a cut felt one I made and a small ceramic one both perched on sticks, the wooden one from my daughter and the toilet paper one featured earlier.
a ghost made of a gourd.
a beaded spider – this handcrafted ornament came with the legend of the spider on the Christmas tree but it was black and orange and I think it belongs on the Fall tree.
a turkey, a pheasant, and a deer.
gnomes and fairies – 2 small gnomes I made with hazelnuts and kidney beans wearing little felt coats, another gnome swinging from a mushroom and fall flower fairies I made with beads, fabric leaves and flowers.
pictures – an ornament made of a vintage Halloween card (a cute little girl witch sitting on a pumpkin) and an ornament made with an old fashioned photograph of two girls, a cornucopia, and a collection of the small cards I make each year to attach to little bags of candy I give friends and coworkers – two Day of the Dead pictures, a skull, a Halloween cat, a raven, 2 cats dancing from a vintage Halloween costume, and a witch silhouette. I copy these from books or magazines – this year is an owl, of course!
I think that’s it. Pictures don’t really do it justice but I am going to post a couple.
The family down the road from us has a huge collection of yard inflatables for every season. There would be even more of these Halloween ones if some of them hadn’t been stolen one year.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 