This is the time of year when I'd like to slough off a lot of my responsibilities. I've talked about it before - "holiday brain" - where I want to bake cookies and make Christmas tree ornaments and sit in my clean quiet house in the evening with my little mantel lights on and knit mittens.

I don't know if it's a form of hibernation, or if it's just a fed-up-ness with the semester and with dealing with people. When I was in graduate school, ironically, I had more free time, and I did a lot of cookie baking BEFORE Christmas - I took plates of cookies and stuff around to the secretaries, I was the person who could always be counted on to pull out a big tray of homebaked goodies for the holiday parties.

I kind of miss that.

I bought the Cuisine magazine Christmas cookie special - there are four or five recipes in there I want to try; I think I will take it with me when I go to visit my folks at Christmas because it seems I get more baking done up there. I also bought the new Martha Stewart Living Christmas magazine. She has some crafts, but much of it is very specialized stuff (where do you buy "honeycomb" paper anyway?) and a lot of it is, well - it's like it's trying so hard to be sophisticated, that it doesn't look homemade.

I also glanced at, but did not buy, the issue of Craft magazine (the one with the Jess Hutch robots on the front). There were a couple essays I would have liked to read - but the thing is like $15 an issue and I couldn't quite con myself into buying it for two essays. I looked at the projects and most of them didn't appeal to me - either they were too self-consciously hip (a tank top with LEDs so it can be made into a sort of marquee) or they were the kind of home-dec project for people who are going for retro-50s or retro-60s moderne.

And that's just not my style. My house is very old-school cottage. It's the classic spinster house; I have either quilts or afghans (and not Jeffersons-referential, 70s-retro granny-square-in-self-mocking-earthtone afghans either) on all the "soft furniture." I have that hobnailed milk glass on display. I have DOILIES, for goodness' sake.

But still. I look at craft magazines and I just want to make stuff. But it seems these days, I'm having a harder time finding the "me" type of craft - either there's a big emphasis on color-photocopying particular clip art and doing things just so and getting things that are cookie cutter versions of what's pictured in the magazine (and therefore, why not just BUY a version?). Or they're aimed at the 28 and under set. Or they're making some kind of political/social commentary. Or, they're really really old-school and they go for (unironically) the stuff like the antebellum-doll tp holders...which isn't me either.

So I don't know.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm a little tired of what's hip now. To me, a lot of it looks either like slick consumerism masquerading as "I did it myself" or else it's sort of an earnest hip irony that I, at 37, find kind of tiring and alienating.

Because, you know? I'm in the generation of "mothers" that crochet and knitting and quilling and God only knows what else is now claiming itself not to be of. It doesn't matter that I'm not biologically a mother; I'm as far away now from my 18 year old students in time as they are from being born.

I want to enjoy the craft I do because it's fun. I want to enjoy it because it makes a pretty and useful finished product. I don't need what I make to be the craft version of the "Daily Show" or anything like that. But sometimes - to use a word I loathe - I feel a bit "marginalized" because what I do doesn't aspire to make any kind of statement. That I merely want it to be "pretty" or "useful" or "warm." And that kind of thing doesn't get press other than "oh, bless her heart..." (in the full Southern meaning).

I don't know. The thing I like about Christmas is that you can (or at least I can) sweep some of that away, you can try to go back deep into the recesses of memory and dredge up a time when you made reindeer by tracing your hands for the antlers, or when clear glitter to make snowy ornaments was something to send you almost over the top with joy, or when you could make something - almost ANYTHING - and give it to a close family member and have them exclaim over it in delight, and you were still to young not to realize they didn't use it (because it was not all that useful, or was impossibly fragile, or because you used every color of glaze the art teacher had available for clay and it looked like a rainbow threw up on your paperweight, or whatever.

Because, you know? A lot of craft for me is the process. The joy of making stuff and not thinking too much about the finished product. And one of the great disappointments of growing up is the development of a sharp-tongued inner critic that feels free to make comments like, "It looks like a rainbow threw up on that!" Now, sometimes, it's easy enough to laugh at mistakes, especially when you know they're mistakes as you're doing them. But there are other times - when you undertake a project with all good intentions, and think you're doing it right - and, well, it still looks like a rainbow threw up on it. And one of the unmourned losses of childhood, I think, is the ability to look at anything uncritically and see the good in it.

I don't know. I tend to feel that it is enough to make something - a mitten, say, and put it on and realize that it fits and it is warm and because of that, to say "Good! Very good!" (as God is supposed to have said, viewing Creation). I don't think the things I knit or sew or glue or put beads on or whatever are big enough to also carry the weight of commentary on their backs, and I don't really need them to.

Sometimes a mitten is just a mitten, and that's enough for me.

(Disclaimer: I'm not taking away from those who do knitting installations, who do "art" with their craft. It's just...I guess it's that I feel there's also a place to celebrate the simple craft of it, the simple but wondrous ingenuity of being able to manipulate sticks and string and get something that is warm and that fits well and that wasn't there before...I feel, I guess, at times that there's too much 'useless' craft out there...I mean, placecard holders are all very nice, I suppose, if you are part of a big WASP family where 40 people gather in the old manse for Thanksgiving...but for a lot of us, those fripperies are just that...I guess it's that too many of the Christmas issues of the magazines I used to count on for ideas have come up kind of dry this year - lots of paper craft, lots of Bedazzled type things (I really don't need a pillow with a naked tree outlined in faux rhinestones), lots of purchased-items-dolled-up-with-a-few-handmade-touches {which I also know has its place but it's kind of, I think, like making pudding out of a box and then putting chocolate chips in it and claiming it's 'homemade'}.)

I don't know what I'm trying to say with this - maybe that I'm getting the feeling that in some circles, "craft" is being made to carry burdens it cannot? That being able to ironically knit a corporate logo into something to mock it isn't going to solve the problems posed by multinational corporations? (And frankly, I think most Middle American's response to the knitted in logo would be the reverse of what the artist intended; they would view it as a tribute to rather than a mockery of the corporation).

Maybe the biggest thing I'm trying to say is that I'd like to see more of a "middle way" between crafts being the neo-Victorian pursuit of ladies of leisure who have TIME to cross stitch 15 placecards with names and little Pilgrims on them for Thanksgiving dinner while her "girl" cleans the house and while the caterers work in the kitchen and the sort of subversive, "the personal is ALWAYS political" commentary of the "underground DIYers."

I guess part of it also is that I get the subtle feeling - from watching the shows on HGTV and also sometimes reading magazine articles - that craft is almost becoming LESS egalitarian, that there is being set up a hierarchy of "innovators" and "blind followers" with only the "innovators" (or people who make money off their craft) being worthy of comment, and I don't like that. There has to be a place for technical skill, as well, I think - that skill and tradition should be celebrated as well, not just iconoclasm.

(I also don't like the impression - which some of the slicker magazines give - that you should simply follow the directions given by the Craft Director to the letter - there is a subtle pressure not to deviate from suggested colors, etc. - again, that's setting up a hierarchy, an "I know better than you so just step back in line and use the brand of paint I tell you to.")

I don't know. Maybe I read more into the thing than I'm meant to. Maybe it's just sour grapes again, as I can promote myself as "The Only Knitting Blogger Without a Book Deal!" But sometimes I wonder if maybe too many of the "grandmothers-whose-knitting-this-is-not" or "mothers-whose-crocheting-this-is-not" are being swept under the rug and forgotten. Or sent down the memory hole, if you want to use a more sinister (and probably greatly overstating) metaphor.