Christmas Art

As I was thinking of how I could incorporate more art into my “art-related blog”, it occurred to me that, since it’s almost Christmas, I should do a post featuring Christmas art.

My first thought was to go to my computer and find my own art, but then I started thinking of other types of Christmas art in my life. So we’ll start with my dad…The reason I took this picture, years ago, was to show some of Daddy’s creative additions to his back porch. You can see that he had mounted a towel rack onto the porch support to make it easier for him to stand up with his bad back. Also observe the coffee cup holder. And that’s only the beginning. My goal is to do a post about his creativity another time. But I bring this up to show you this…These are the Christmas lights Daddy designed and put together, for which he repeatedly won the town’s yearly “Best Christmas Lights” award. (This was after all of us kids were grown and gone.) I always wondered if this was the same Daddy who, when we were kids, used to have to be begged to put up just one string of those old-fashioned Christmas lights in the 60s and 70s! But I include this beacuse it really was an art form.Another Christmas art form you may not have thought about is the lowly gingerbread house!This year I had the honor of helping make gingerbread houses with my friend’s 1st and 2nd grade class. (One of the benefits of being retired! Just saying.)

Any way you look at it, you have to agree it’s art!You’ve seen these before if you’ve read “Gingerbread Adventures”. But they’re worth seeing again, while we’re on the subject of gingerbread.

Gingerbread manger scene from 2012.

Another type of Christmas art can be found in the classroom. (Or, could be, in the days before state standards pushed the creativity out of my lesson plans – wait, did I say that out loud?) For years, my English learner class and I would do a Christmas presentation. The more proficient students did the speaking parts, but the beginners still got to help by making the props and backdrops. We had so much fun, and invited the principal and other admins in to watch. Afterwards we served refreshments and the kids autographed the “programs” we handed out to the guests. The photo above is from (you guessed it) “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” which we later got to perform for a school board meeting. This is the backdrop from the year we did “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. That orange thing on the right was the refrigerator, which, when opened revealed the food that the Whos had for their Christmas feast.We kind of “cheated” on this one, because I let the kids set up the overhead projector in front of the door so they could trace the drawing from a transparency. In 2005 I had a 7th grader from Oaxaca who came in knowing Spanish and Mixteco, but no English whatsoever. One of the ways he began to fit in and participate was through his incredible artistic talent. That year we did “I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas”, and he drew the hippo freehand by looking at the tiny clipart on the paper you see beside him. While they were drawing I remember constantly repeating to the kids, “Nobody touch the hippo unless Jorge tells you to!” I used this picture in “Down to the Letter”, but it was one of the first “Christmas drawings” I did, in 2011. Below you can see a few more Christmas designs.