A Very Dennison Thanksgiving

I’ve always felt that in the holiday decoration department, Thanksgiving kind of gets the short shrift.  I mean, there’s “fall décor.”  You know…leaves and pumpkins and little decorative haystacks.  And while those are great, where are the blown-glass wishbones, the light-up Plymouth Rocks, and the giant inflatable Sarah Josepha Hales?  (Deep cut. Google it.) 

Admittedly, those things all sound terrible.  And while you can buy the odd turkey-themed item, I’m the crafty sort, and this year I decided to make a Thoroughly Thanksgiving-y Decoration.

When did I decide this, you might ask?  Why, the night before Thanksgiving, of course!  “But Melanie!” you exclaim. “How will you ever get the inspiration for a Thoroughly Thanksgiving-y Decoration in just one evening?” 

Aha, my friends.  I’m glad you asked.  I don’t need inspiration!  I have Dennison’s Party Magazine.

Now, if you’ve never heard of the Dennison Manufacturing Company, you’re not alone.  I hadn’t either, until I found a copy of this magazine in the stacks of the central library.  The Framingham Historical Society website filled me in, though, and now I can’t believe I was ever such an ignorant cuss.

Aaron Dennison was a jeweler and watchmaker in the 1840s.  He wanted better boxes for his wares, so he and his dad and his brother formed a company that made the first jeweler’s boxes in America, and while they were at it, they invented that cotton stuff you put in jewelry boxes, too.  The company then spent the next 150 years doing things like making the first sticky paper in the United States, creating the concept of gift wrap, and inventing those little gummed circles you stick around the holes of loose-leaf paper.  They also initiated the process of the autoclave, made the first sequential bar codes for the USPS, and created those plastic things that hold price tags onto clothes.  HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS COMPANY???  But the most amazing thing is that for a few years in the late 20s and early 30s, they put out Dennison’s Party Magazine, the sole purpose of which seems to be to suggest ways to use the crepe paper that they invented.  Oh by the way THEY INVENTED CREPE PAPER.

This particular issue is from the fall of 1928, so it encompasses Halloween parties, Thanksgiving parties, Columbus Day parties, Harvest Parties, and, inexplicably, a Prison Party.  (A suit box covered in crepe paper makes a darling penitentiary tower, apparently.)  I was first grabbed by the Halloween section.  I mean, look at these costumes!  It’s amazing how sensational a person can look in a costume made of nothing more than 2 Folds Orange Crepe Paper, 3 Folds Black Crepe Paper, and 2 Doz. No. 9 Wire.  Unfortunately, I was unable to make this costume for myself, as “Detailed instructions for making any of the costumes illustrated may be had by writing the nearest Dennison Store”, so I think I’m out of luck. 

And maybe that’s just as well.  Those costumes are only illustrations, so it’s hard to say what they’d look like in real life.  But the Dennison Company got real with its Owl and The Pussycat costumes.  Here’s the sketch…

…and here are the costumes.

No amount of crepe paper can disguise the sadness radiating from that poor pussycat.  And then there are these Tall and Short costumes, for when you just don’t care anymore.

So I started to look more closely for truth in advertising.  How about this idea for decorating a gymnasium, for example?

In Dennison’s own words “A frieze of Decorated Crepe Paper is most effective, and Festoons of deep-hanging fringe can be attached at intervals from the beams.”  And there’s this lovely illustration on Page 22.  But sneak back to page 11, and…

What is even happening here?  It IS Halloween-y, in that it looks exactly like when you carve open a pumpkin and all the innards are hanging down from the top.  I didn’t take any of Dennison’s advice when decking my Halloween Halls. 

But here it is, the night before Thanksgiving.  My family has had kind of a tough week, we’re all a little blue, and I thought our tiny group might benefit from the arrival of a thoroughly ridiculous and Dennisonian delight.  So I started paging through the Thanksgiving suggestions. 

Hmm…  Well, there’s this Mayflower Squash, which is actually pretty awesome, and has the added bonus of being consumable, but I don’t have that shape of squash, and I can’t possibly go to the store the night before Thanksgiving, so that’s out.

There are these saucy little Pilgrim People made of lollipops.  But we’re not really much of a hard candy family, and I have no faith in my ability to make a lollipop pilgrim look that much like Betty Boop, so I keep looking.

Now it starts to get weird.  There’s this guy.  The magazine says “Did you ever try making grotesque folks of raisins, candy and such?”  No, Dennison.  No, I did not.  And I don’t aim to start now.

Then they suggest this.  A Pilgrim Cradle.  What?  What is that?  Listen, I busted out Sarah Josepha Hale, so I’m obviously an expert on Thanksgiving, and I’ve never heard of a Pilgrim Cradle, so it’s clearly not a thing.  I’m getting a little desperate when I come upon this. 

A cornucopia.  Okay!  That’s definitely a thing.  And you fill it with food, which is my favorite SORT of thing.  Dennison’s says “Even the horn of plenty may take on a modernistic shape.  Made of cardboard covered with metallic crepe paper, it will form a lovely centerpiece.”  Well, there you go!  It’s going to be lovely!  Dennison’s said so, and they wouldn’t lie! They invented autoclaving, for Pete’s sake!  And the best part is, there’s no writing to my local Dennison’s store, as “A diagram pattern and instructions are on page 17.”

On page 17, I’m shown a tiny pattern and told to size it up.  I go to the basement to get some butcher paper, and get to work.  Dennison’s says “You will find that it is very easy to make a correctly proportioned pattern in this way.”  Dennison’s has clearly never met me before.  I’m barely out of the first square before I screw up. 

But I get it done, more or less.  It looks a lot like the pattern the Grinch uses to make his Santa hat, but it’s early still.

I now have to trace the pattern onto cardboard.  I go back downstairs to get a box to cut up.  One giant X-Acto knife jab to the dining table later, and I’m set.  Now I’ve got to cover it with gold metallic paper.  Back down to the basement for some Christmas tissue.  The magazine says to “Crush the gold metallic paper by placing it on a table or other smooth surface and taking up a small portion between the thumbs and fingers of both hands and crushing it tightly.”  That seems like a lot of words to tell me how to crumple paper.  Maybe skip that and tell me how to make the darned bat costume, Dennison!  But never mind.  I crumple on my smooth surface (or what was a smooth surface before I jabbed it with the X-Acto knife) and move onwards.

Now I need a 5” square box.  Down to the basement again.  (No, I will NOT read all the directions ahead of time!)  The box isn’t  5” square, but I don’t run a paper box factory, so I figure it’s close enough.  Next I’m told to paste gold paper to everything, and then fasten the sides to the box with brass brads, which I keep UPSTAIRS!  I’m on fire!!!!! 

Now I’m supposed to glue the points together, but I’m too lazy to sit and hold them while they dry, so I binder clip them together while I eat some dinner and listen to Thanksgiving music.  (Yeah, I don’t know what that is either.  I just listened to The Carpenters and Acker Bilk.)  When I come back from dinner I look at my cornucopia and I realize…it looks REALLY stupid.  Like, not even fun “cheer up the family” stupid, but just straight up dumb. 

But never mind.  It still gets a ribbon bow (from the basement), and sprays of fall leaves (from the yard), so that will probably help, right?  And  once there are vegetables spilling out from it, it will surely look terrific!  Vegetables ALWAYS looks great, right Dennison? 

Oh dear.

Well, the horn of plenty is done.  Naturally I set it up to best effect on my mantle, surrounded by more leaves and vegetables and a silly paper turkey I made another year that I got a Thanksgiving-decoration bee in my bonnet.  And it all just looks ridiculous.

BUT… As I sit here writing at the kitchen table, looking at this silly thing, I realize…I really like it.  It does exactly what Thanksgiving is supposed to do, which is remind me how much I have to be grateful for.  I have so much food, I can afford to use it for decoration, and then just give it to my amazing parents, who love me in spite of (and maybe even because of) the fact that I’m going to show up at their house with a “modern” centerpiece copied from a 90 year old advertising publication.  So I guess I’m probably the luckiest girl in the whole U.S.A.

Thanks, Dennison.  And Happy Thanksgiving.

...with every Christmas card I hot-glue

I come from a card-sending family; on my mom's side in particular. I always know the first week in December will bring a flurry of mail from the Peters, a trait that seems to be sharpening in the younger generations.  This year I got a card from my cousin's daughter two days after Thanksgiving. STOP MAKING ME LOOK BAD WITH YOUR SUPER-TIMELY PICTURES OF YOUR ADORABLE KID!  UGH! (No, I'm just kidding, Emily, you're awesome.)  My dad's side of the family is, as in most things, more... relaxed about it.  I remember once, in college, getting a card in the mail from my grandparents on my actual birthday, the first week in May.  I was shocked because historically Grandma was very late with cards.  But when I opened it, it was my Christmas card, and my universe fell happily back into place.  

I fall somewhere in between.  My cards get sent before Christmas, but they certainly do not go out December 1st.  And here's my semi-reasonable excuse: I make my own cards.  Every year, somewhere around December 15th I find myself sweaty and frazzled, surrounded by schnitzels of paper and rubber cement cobwebs; cutting, pasting, gluing, addressing, stamping, and licking around 90 cards to my innermost circle of friends and family.  And there's always at least another 90 people I'd like to include, but by that point I'm wishing I'd just sent a Facebook message, and you'd pretty much have to be my long-lost identical twin and/or an actual potentate to get added to the list.

I made my first cards in 2004.  I know this because I dated them on the back, like they'd be archived as collectibles in some catalogue instead of tossed into recycling bins across the nation on December 26.  I don't remember exactly why I started.  Probably a combination of my Germanic-Midwestern frugality (cheapness) and my need for my cards to speak to my soul and represent my true self to the recipients (hippie-dippie-ness.).  Anyway, I found some K-mart wrapping paper with terrifically jolly vintage-looking snowmen on a red background, cut them out with a crinkly-edged scissors so they looked almost on-purpose, hot-glued on some rick-rack (mankind's greatest invention) and sent them off.  Looking back, I see that nothing was straight, but crooked gluing has become a treasured holiday tradition for me, like burning the first batch of caramels and forgetting to water the tree.

Here's another one I made.  See that stitching?  Cute, right?  Not straight.

And this one, from the year I moved to St. Paul.  Very appropriate.  Also not straight.

And this is one of my all-time favorites.  A illustration from a 1960s holiday cookbook, with a message from a 1950s 7-Up ad, and more rick-rack.  I mean, come on!  IT'S ADORABLE!  And totally not straight.   I imagine by now you are noticing the theme.  And bear in mind, these are the ones I kept for my archive.  Meaning, these were the neat ones.  There were plenty of them that turned out worse.  I remember once sending off a particularly messy card to Great-Aunt Frieda with the justification that she couldn't see very well anyway.  I'M A MONSTER!!!

Oh, and then there was this year.  I somehow convinced my artist boyfriend to cut out 90 of these silhouettes (if I'd done them myself there'd have been, like, two stumps and a garbage can.)  So at least it's straight.  But I was in charge of glitter and glue, and apparently I was a little lackadaisical about making sure the glitter stuck, and everyone got a glitter shower when they opened the envelopes. I got a Christmas card from my good friend Jesse saying "Thanks for making our apartment look like a gay disco."  (Sorry, everybody.)

So why do I do it?  It would certainly be, as my dad sad, easier to just go to Walmart.  I'd free up a good 15-20 hours, send out cards my friends would actually want to display, and be far less likely to superglue my eyelid shut.  (Don't ask.)  Why can't I just by a $15 box of cards and be done with it?  Maybe it's because I'm cheap.  Maybe it's because I'm hippie-dippie.  Maybe it's because I just really like the smell of rubber cement.  But I think the true answer lies, as most answers do, in the Better Homes and Garden 1967 Christmas Ideas Book.

The photo isn't straight (shocker)  but you can see that it's an article about homemade cards.  And here's what they have to say.

“Make a special card, yourself, and you’re sure it will get a second glance, probably more. Personalize it with a special message, a snapshot, or an amusing cutout. A special paste-on, an added seal or ribbon, make a card more personal than the nicest one you can buy.”

— Christmas Ideas for 1967

I guess that's what I want; I want it to be personal.  I mean, let's face it.  Christmas is the one time of the year most of us send mail at all.  And a lot of the people I send cards to haven't seen me in years.  Now, the second glance I get may be my relatives saying "Wait, when did Melanie have kids?  Because surely no adult made this."  The amusing cutout may be surrounded by hateful, insidious glitter.  And the special message may look suspiciously like someone went on auto-pilot and started writing "Melanie" where it should have said "Merry Christmas" and tried to scribble a design over it to make it look on purpose.  (Sorry, Aunt Delores.)  But it's personal.  It's a bit of me that I can send and say, "you might not see me very often, but here's who I am. I'm a person who likes glitter, and rick-rack, and 7-up ads from the 1950s, and whose glue-gun can't keep up with her crafting excitement.  I'm a person who really, truly wants you to have a merry Christmas, and wishes she saw you more often, because she really likes who you are too."  My cards, like me, are not perfect, but we mean really well.  And honestly, if you look closely at that red-and-white stamped card in the magazine?  That's not straight either.  AND IT'S IN BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS!!!!

So here it is.  The 2017 Melanie Christmas card.  If you get one in the mail, please know that your tree may be raggedy because my scissors are dull, your zip code may be scribbled over because I forgot to buy extra envelopes, and your candy-striped ribbon will almost certainly not be straight.  But you'll think about me for a second, and that's really nice to know.  So Merry Christmas everyone...from 7-up.

Adulting...with crayons

My grandparents on my dad's side were hoarders.  Not "gosh, they like to collect things, so we're using this popular phrase jokingly" hoarders, but "there's barely a path from the door to the couch" hoarders.  Or so I hear.  I haven't been in their house since I was a baby.  They sort of stopped inviting people over, so I've only had it described to me.  But even when my dad describes it as a place where there's nowhere to sit and there are oatmeal containers of egg shells in the kitchen, in my imagination it is a wonderland filled with treasure.  Partly that's because since my Grandma moved into an assisted living facility, I've been gifted with amazing delights like matchbooks from Chicago restaurants in the 60s, and Grandpas's purple velvet tux.  I mean, who WOULDN'T want those things?  (Sidenote:  Apparently Grandma always justified her keeping ways by saying "But someone might want it some day."  And now I am proving her right.  Sorry Dad!  You're welcome, Grandma!)

But this isn't a new feeling; that of an adult receiving mementos of her family's life.  Even as I kid, I had the sneaking suspicion that anything I really wanted was probably somewhere in the house in Morton Grove.  Case in Point:  When I was around 9 or 10 years old, I was really interested in the 1950s. (I played alone a lot.)  I told Mom I wished I had some magazines from the 50s so I could see pictures of the clothes and houses and things, and Mom said "I'm sure Grandma has some."  And sure enough, I was given a handful of magazines that shaped my aesthetic for the rest of eternity, and cemented my absolute devotion to old-timey ladies magazines.  I've amassed quite a collection in the last 30 years, and I've always got room for more, but these five are my favorites.  I know every picture, every ad, every story in each, and they are all PERFECT.

And one of the magazines was a double jackpot, because it was the DECEMBER ISSUE!!!  CHRISTMAS!!!!!! Oh my gosh.  The greatest.  It's a fabulous magazine called "Living for Young Homemakers."  I don't know much about this magazine, as it doesn't make the cut on the "List of Defunct Ladies' Magazines" page on Wikipedia, which is about as far as my research has gone.  But it's awesome.  (Do you have issues of it, sitting around and making your family think you're a hoarder?  SEND THEM TO ME!)  It's definitely aimed at the young and perhaps would-be urbane set.  But young urbane people have kids, so there's a spread about dolls and dollhouses.  LOOK AT THIS, PEOPLE.  

Did I lose my 9-year-old mind?  Of COURSE I did.  It's everything.  Toys, party dresses, playing house, and that weird 3-D/2-D combination art that I've always loved (I know that's very specific, but thanks, Living for Young Homemakers December 1960.) In any case, I pulled this magazine out again this Christmas, and as I was flipping through it, I had a revelation.  I never wanted those dolls.  I wanted to BE those dolls!  I still want to be them, and the good thing is that now I am an adult, and I can do or be whatever I want.

In particular, I want to be this little minx in the kitchen.  Look at this!  She's got everything: the ruffled dress with the crinoline, the weird mechanical cardboard clock, the appliances (man, the appliances!), the wide variety of cereals from which to choose, the dog and cat that get along and will never pee on your bed, and that pink carpet sweeper.  (Dear lord, it's almost too much to bear.)  Well, a lot of those things are out of my reach, at least just sitting around the house on a Monday night.  But you know what I CAN have?  That swell 2-D drawing of a candy shop, because I have a box of crayons and a can-do attitude!

So here it is!  I certainly couldn't be bothered to buy anything (or put on pants and leave the house), so I took the paper I'd used to make a photo backdrop for Mom and Dad's golden wedding anniversary, taped it around my protest sign from the Women's March, pulled out my box of 64 Crayolas, and went to work.  It's not too bad, right?  Especially there on the mantel with the candles and the Santa mug and pitcher set. 

Look, I know it's dumb. But isn't that part of being an adult?  Getting to have those things you've always wanted?  And honestly, all it cost me was a trip to the basement and an hour or two (I'm sure you could do it in 30 minutes, but I am, frankly, a lousy drawer.  My first attempt at the jars looked like someone had run over a horny toad.) And it makes me happy every time I walk past it, so now I'm the proud owner of something I've coveted since I was 9.  ADULTING!  (...with crayons...)