Most of the ornaments on my Christmas tree were hand painted or handmade by my mom, by my sisters, or by me. I’ve also adorned my fake fireplace and my real mantle with a plaster village and other decorations that I painted. Indeed, most of the tree’s hand-painted ornaments are plaster.

Some are wooden, though. They represent my first attempts at craftiness. I can remember the first time I spotted said ornaments in my mom’s craft catalog, which is heavy on needlepoint items. I cannot do any type of needlepoint, but I am a catalog fiend. Hence, that is why I was flipping through the catalog on that snowy day back in the 1990s.

When I spied those wooded ornament kits, I said to myself, “Self, you’re not artistic, but this is like paint by number. What idiot can’t paint by number?”

At first, I tried my best to prove that this idiot couldn’t paint by number. In fact, the first ornament I painted – a gingerbread house – looked so bad that I eventually threw it away.

Although I never put that hideous thing on a tree, I kept it for a while. It served as inspiration.

Take the deformed bunny. (By the way, for reasons I don’t understand, the bunny is hanging out with a polar bear. What kind of bunny befriends a polar bear?) The bunny is shown in profile and its eye sets too far down its face and too close to its nose. This leaves entirely too much of a forehead. Oh, and one ear is too pointy and the pink part of the other ear extends onto that big ole forehead.

I have put other not-exactly-hideous but less-than-pleasing-to-the-eye ornaments on the tree. I still do.

I also created a semi-deformed donkey.

The donkey resides on one side of a house. Not a real house in which humans live. How would I hang that on a tree? A mini house. It’s part of a six-house set. The donkey actually doesn’t look that bad – except for the snout. Not only is it rather large, it has no holes. I’m not sure how the donkey has been breathing all these years.

Another house features a figure whose existence makes my loved ones laugh and laugh. All I’ll say is that he’s supposed to be Santa. Since he does not look a thing like Santa, he has caused tremendous excitement over the years. In this year alone, on separate visits to my house, two loved ones have scampered to my tree and strained their bodies, asking, “Where is he?”

I put him and the deformed bunny and the semi-deformed donkey on the tree each year because they elicit chuckles and because they remind me of how far I’ve come.

Indeed, another visitor this year commented on the village and other decorations adorning my fake fireplace and my real mantle. When I explained that I had painted them, the visitor looked closer at one of them and noted the detail.

I saw no reason to point out the deformed bunny.

Merry Christmas!

This post originally appeared in the Appalachian News-Express.

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