‘We’ve got a house full of homemade horrors’: Frances Whiting on amusing Christmas craft

We have a house full of homemade horrors from our children, although none perhaps as frightening as our Christmas angel, writes Frances Whiting.

One December, when she was about five or six, my daughter came home from school holding a bag, and inside, she told me, was a Christmas decoration she had made in class.

What could it be, I wondered? An adorable Paddle Pop stick Christmas tree with her photo at its centre? A toilet roll bonbon with bits of crepe paper stuck to it?

“It’s an angel,” she replied. “A pottery Christmas angel.”

“How lovely!” I said, reaching into the brown paper bag.

Reader, it was not lovely. It was, however, a hideous, screaming banshee from the gates of hell howling at us from its terrible, open maw.

It had a large, misshapen, clay body, an extremely small head from which it stared at me with sunken clay eyes – oh, the eyes, the eyes – a wide, gaping mouth, and little bits of wire protruding in all directions from its skull, as if our Christmas angel had stuck one of her horrible, bony fingers in an electrical socket.

“Oh, my goodness,” I managed, holding the angel at arm’s length.

“Do you like her?” my daughter asked in her sweet, little girl voice which frankly at the time made me quickly check if her head wasn’t spinning on its axis.

Frances Whiting shares her family’s treasured Christmas crafts. Picture: David Clark

“I love her,” I said which, as all mothers know, is the correct response to anything a child has made, even if that thing could possibly do away with your whole family on Christmas Eve.

Honestly, we’ve got a house full of homemade horrors from our children, and I’m sure many of you do too, although none perhaps as frightening as our Christmas angel, who we eventually christened Brunhilda, to make her even more terrifying.

Anyway, since then Brunhilda has become very much a part of our Christmases, not least because we are too scared to throw her out, lest she wreak revenge on our family for generations to come.

Instead she is displayed each year as the centrepiece of our holiday table, where we amuse ourselves by watching the faces of our horrified guests as she watches them with her terrible, sunken eyes.

The thing is, we’ve become rather fond of the old banshee, as she represents the true spirit of Christmas, namely pretending to like gifts that you do not.

No, that’s not it. Instead, Brunhilda is part of a strong Christmas tradition of gifts made from little hands, gifts that may be truly awful (my friend Rachel, for example, has a charming set of fornicating reindeers made from pipe cleaners) but are made for very little money, with buckets of love.

Christmas trees around the country are peppered with such things; sticky, glittery stars, wonky paper lanterns, and photos from kindy nestled in the middle of decorations, or shoeboxes filled with hand-drawn cards from long ago.

These, I suspect, are the Christmas treasures that will sustain us in years to come, and these are the sorts of treasures I wish for you this Christmas, either from your own family, or the one you have chosen to spend it with. Just something from someone you love.

Merry Christmas to you all, with the very best of wishes from my family (and Brunhilda) to yours.

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Originally published as ‘We’ve got a house full of homemade horrors’: Frances Whiting on amusing Christmas craft