When it comes to the holidays, expectations often outstrip reality. For those of us who choose to celebrate the season through home décor, this can be particularly traumatic, especially when the desire to deck is unaccompanied by any real talent or flair. Even worse, holiday preparations can highlight sharp divisions between couples about everything from religion to the relative merits of spruce versus pine.

Our home is a perfect example. My husband is a committed atheist and deeply distrustful of the rampant commercialism of Christmas, and so he is naturally wary of all things Yule. He is also a trained artist with a finely-honed aesthetic sense and the son of a domestic genius who excels at tasteful, skillfully-rendered seasonal décor. By contrast, I was raised by a single mom who worked full-time, and so my childhood didn’t exactly include an abundance of evergreen garlands or cut-out cookies. As for my artistic abilities, let’s just say that thirty-two years later, I still recall with perfect, stinging clarity my kindergarten teacher’s observation that I had “a problem with glue.” 

I’m also easily seduced by the lure of a red, white, and green Christmas. The truth is, I long for a holiday like those from my cherished childhood copy of A Tasha Tudor Christmas. I want gingerbread houses and the hint of cinnamon in every room; a posse of handcarved Santas on the mantle; a tree lit with candles and strung with cranberries and popcorn; and vast, quivering dishes of plum pudding, preferably all aflame. And, even more, I want to fabricate and bake and stitch all of these things by myself. 

Needless to say, this urge has gotten me into all kinds of trouble.

One year, I took Martha Stewart’s advice and tried to wire festive wreaths of jingle bells for my doorknobs. Three hours and 22 dollars later, a lopsided carwreck of twisted metal hung from my door, clanging in harsh reproach with every entrance and exit, until I finally threw it away in disgust. 

Another time I followed a family magazine’s suggestion for making a mini Christmas tree with edible decorations, which involved stabbing Hershey’s kisses with straightened paper clips and awkwardly wrapping them around tiny, artificial pine boughs. My mother-in-law kindly proclaimed the surreal result “interesting.” (I was pregnant that year, and so I ate the mutilated candies over the course of the next week before shoving the denuded tree into the deepest recesses of the attic.) 

Martha led me down the primrose path again last year, when I decided for the children’s sake to replace our dangerous glass ornaments with “luminous fabric balls,” made by overlapping slices of fabric and ribbon around Styrofoam balls and securing them with craft glue and dressmaker’s pins. Not surprisingly, the geometry proved beyond me. The fabric ended up stretched awkwardly over its target, marked with my signature splotches of glue. I quickly quarantined the few I managed to complete after I found my then 3-year-old son, Ned, gleefully jabbing the furniture with pins he’d harvested from them.

And on and on it goes—wreaths with bows so misshapen as to resemble used, red and green Kleenex; centerpieces that struggle to transcend their banal carnations; a saucepan of candy coating, hardened into a massive chocolate candle because of excess paraffin. Through it all, my efforts have unfolded under the barely-checked contempt of my horrified husband. Alone and unsupported, I have soldiered on, becoming more discouraged with every passing year, certain that I will never manage to create my own holiday magic.

But in the true spirit of Christmas miracles, everything suddenly changed this year. It actually began back at Halloween, when Ned, now 4, suggested that we "spooky up" the house. As we struggled to fashion faux spider webs from shredded pillow stuffing and scotch tape, I found myself admiring his undaunted cheer, despite our limited abilities and the questionable spookiness of our efforts. And I was completely unprepared for the delight that he and his little sister took in our results. Who knew that polyester batting and a few cheap plastic pumpkins could create such a buzz?

At that moment, I realized that I was no longer alone. Starting this Christmas, I would have two enthusiastic allies in whatever half-baked Yuletide projects I chose to undertake. Totally outnumbered, and as susceptible to his children’s excited joy as any parent, my husband would be completely unable to object.

Best of all, with a crew of willing helpers at my side, even my most imperfect handiwork would finally have the effect that I longed for:  to create a few fond memories of domestic joy, which is the best thing about Christmas anyway. And who knows? Maybe my kids will even grow up believing, all evidence to the contrary, that Tasha Tudor has nothing on Mom.

Leslie Watson is a freelance writer in Northeast Minneapolis. When she’s not busy cleaning up spilled glue, she can be found online at www.thebusypen.com.