Thursday, December 9, 2010

Fat Devil-Child


Every year my Mimi gave me an ornament around Christmas. Her ornaments are the base upon which my entire ornament collection is built. That yearly gift is probably a big part of the reason I give each of my kids and my husband an ornament every Thanksgiving Day. (I started that tradition long before I had kids, by the way – my husband has a bunch of ornaments from me. Twenty, I guess.)

She gave me this ornament in 1983. So, if the engraver accurately recorded the year I was 12 years old. (My daughter is almost 12…that’s a little freaky.) I remember when getting items engraved was all the rage.

Check it out – the engraving was done freehand. Nowadays I think it’s the case that computers and machines do the engraving so it’s all perfect. But this brings back memories of watching the engravers at work in those little kiosks in the mall. I used to be SO impressed with them – my handwriting wasn’t so hot as a pre-teen and I imagined that the pressure to write well must have been intense. I also wondered what happened if they messed one up – did they have to pay for it themselves?

Okay, okay. So I tended to over think things just a bit. Thank goodness I’ve outgrown that tendency, right?

I simply must point out a couple of odd things about this ornament which never occurred to me until tonight, when I really examined it. First of all, the kid putting the letter into the mailbox has a rather big butt. It's hard to tell with this picture, but when you see it in person, you can tell they included a butt crack on the outside of his/her pants. So the kid is either fat or is wearing tight pants. Or maybe both.  At any rate, I don’t think those pants are doing him/her any favors in the fashion department.

In addition, I guess this kid is supposed to be an angel because he/she has wings. But the wings don’t strike me as very angelic. They have sharp points. Isn’t that a devilish look? Makes me wonder if there are horns under his/her hat.

I’m kind of regretting taking a closer look at this ornament because now it looks to me as if an unfashionable devil-child with a really big butt is mailing a letter. Guess that’s what I get for over thinking…

I’ll end with a funny story about this ornament. My husband kept trying to steal it from me during our first two or three years of marriage. You see, his sister’s name is Jennifer (she’s just a month younger than me…yet another 1971 Jennifer) and she had an ornament EXACTLY like this. Every time I’d pull it out, he’d say: “Hey, that’s my sister’s. We need to give it back to her.”

Um. No we don’t. Hands off my fat devil-child, dude!

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