Category: the world as we experience it

  • The Christmas Stocking Story

    The Christmas Stocking Story

    Giving of arts and crafts has been interwoven tradition in my family for years. In lean years, we made gifts for people. I still have several of the treasures that my talented mother made. I have some also that I made for family members not with us any longer. I have been making Christmas stockings for people in my family since my first born. My great grandmother made my first Christmas stocking that I still have and display each year. My grandmother made a giant Christmas stocking that has inspired me always in my work on Christmas stockings.

    I love all of the handmade crafts made by my family – these are true treasures. Even more, I love the memory of being taught how to do something by family and friends. My mom taught me how to do needlework (crewel embroidery), that I learned in Girl Scouts, but didn’t refine until my mom showed me some key points of understanding about the skill – today we’d call them “hacks”. Back in the day, we did not have social media and widespread how-to’s available to us except in books and magazines or if we were lucky, with a mom or grandmother who could show us what to do real-time.

    Very much I wanted to carry on the spirit of tradition and love of making by hand the Christmas stockings. In this, I made a Christmas stocking for my grandchild just in time for his first Christmas in 2015. It was a work of love and hard work this is. Needle work is always hard and it takes love to drive it and have it look right – creativity is a must. Here is a little video of my tour of the stocking (pardon my amateurish camera work!). Hoping that this lasts so that my grandson can see this one day, and appreciate it.

    Everyone loves to look at the work and ask about the history. Some of these are deeply handmade, some are just choices of really cute little items that we’ve found that we wanted to include in the work.

    Love

    Of – My Grandson and Carrying on Tradition by Making…

    Visual Memories From the Generations

    Especially for My Grandson – A Christmas Stocking Story by Geema

  • Being on this planet…for a while…Does your head in. Seriously.

    Being on this planet…for a while…Does your head in. Seriously.

    Each year. Every month. Down to the day. Sometimes to the hour or the minute. Our perceptions of change, and sudden realizations, push on our stabilizers. Like a sudden wind that blows you nearly off your feet, you have to be prepared for that. In my observation, people react in different ways…

    One. Some people freak out. They just panic. Someone else has to settle them down.

    Two. Some people kind of freak out at first, then settle down and sort stuff out. They analyze and examine, and re-examine, until they think they understand as well as they can, then maybe they go outside and ask someone else to help them analyze the situation and sort it out.

    Three. Some people say “whatever”, and let the wind blow, holding on, until it settles down, then they move along. They don’t take the time to sort anything out. They just consider it to be “something that either is going to happen regardless, or something that could happen, but it doesn’t matter – it’s out of the reach of control…”

    Four. They just simply pray. They don’t do anything but pray. They pray to their God, or their whatever… It depends on where they are in the world.

    Five. They say, “Yeah. I’m a shit magnet. Stuff always happens to me. I’m doomed.”

    OK, so I think I have the categories pegged. And probably, at different times, some of us react one to many of those ways.

    We are all in the family of man, like it or not – you must admit it. We are also survival oriented. It’s in our DNA. We generally cannot help this because we are hard-wired to react mostly that way first, until our culture or something has us altering our basic belief systems and points of reference – that’s were we tend to morph and whether it changes our DNA, or not, it definitely changes our behaviors and our reactions to sudden change in our daily lives. I am convinced of this, 100%.

    These are my observations. Right or wrong, “these opinions are not those of the management, but strictly those of the individual”.

    There you go.