Prompt A: a crafting memory from your childhood

Well, this is tough. I've never been much of a crafter, unless you count tie-dying shirts and accidentally spilling Bedazzler jewels all over the floor of the kitchen and making my older sister cry.

This might not be much of a craft, but one year in elementary school--it must have been second or third grade--we made Christmas ornaments. It's a pretty simple concept, really (kind of embarrassingly simple to be posting on a knitting blog; but hey, it's a fond memory, so shut up): take a crayon, glue some googly eyes and a puff of cotton on it, then stick some glitter on there and you've got a little crayon-Santa staring at you wide-eyed as you hang it on the tree with some gold thread as if you're sentencing it to death.

My crayon-Santa is purple. It's always been my favorite color. It made a pretty crappy Santa--everyone else chose red or maybe green--but I didn't care. Actually, I didn't care about the thing much when I first made it. Everyone had to do it, so it lost its appeal.

The real reason it means a lot to me is that my parents kept it. It still gets hung on the tree every year, even though the makeshift beard is falling off. I don't know how the eyes are still attached; we must have had industrial-strength glue in our classroom. But the point is, it's still stored in the garage with all of my grandmother's Russian ornaments, the wooden cabins and the metal etchings, the little figures my mother painted when she was a little girl. How the hell my purple Santa thing is cool enough to be associated with those is beyond me. And that makes me feel pretty special, honestly.

My parents do their best to keep all the little crafts we made, whether they're poorly-spelled Valentine's Day cards and letters to Santa, pandas made out of paper plates for Earth Day, or glitter-coated sheets of construction paper we gave them for Mother's or Father's Day. We like to take them out and laugh at them, but I suspect that for my parents it's more than a laugh. It's a fond memory of a time when we were still (mostly) sweet and innocent. And now we're all out of the house (again, mostly) and only see each other for holidays. Maybe that's why they treasure the holiday items we made so long ago the most: they knew it'd be our favorite time of year for another reason than presents someday.