Fine Art Of Grandmothering
Dixie Barton finds her best gifts at thrift stores.
“St. Vinnies, Saturdays, two for a quarter in the bin,” she says proudly, holding up a sparkly green ice skater’s skirt she found for one of her granddaughters.
She doesn’t wrap the items. She tears them apart, glues them or paints them or adds glitter. She gives them to her grandchildren for art projects and costumes.
Grandmotherhood is no time to kick back.
“I just love being a grandmother,” Dixie says. “That’s my job now and I take it seriously.”
Dixie leaped toward Grandmother of the Year this fall when she invited her 10 grandchildren to her pint-sized Coeur d’Alene home for a month of art workshops. She’s always loved creating something from nothing.
The kids designed towering hats of gold-painted toilet-paper tubes and plastic soda bottles on top of mortarboards Dixie found at Goodwill. They glued on garlands and feathers, plastic mice and glittery Christmas balls for the fanciest headwear in town.
The exotic hats and dress-up clothes needed an audience, so Dixie and the kids planned a Christmas party. They invited 43 relatives and friends and began working furiously on decorations.
The grandkids made snowman pictures from tissue paper and glued wrapping paper on empty boxes. Dixie created name tags from old Christmas cards.
She personalized each with charms representing hobbies, interests, even vacations.
“I tell you what, I can’t throw anything away,” she says, pointing to a broken ornament she used as a lacy border for several tags.
Her piece de resistance came the day of the party. With her son’s help, she hung white lights, silver snowflakes, white cellophane streamers and a gold crescent moon on one side of her living room ceiling for the feel of snow.
On the other side, she draped furry green streamers radiating from a fan in the middle, giant candy canes and balloon Christmas balls for the under-the-tree feel.
The Christmas tree in the middle of the room was white on one side and green on the other.
“When I retired early two years ago, I didn’t have a creative bone in my body for the first 18 months,” Dixie says. She’d worked as a fiscal officer for Head Start. “I got going again with the kids.”
Which made the season merry for them all.
Big kids play too
The tables at the National Guard Armory’s Toys for Tots center were covered with Barbie gear, packages of stickers, stuffed animals and small homemade mittens. The Marine Corps League’s Dean Allen stuffed a few of each into a black plastic bag for three sisters with small hopes for Christmas.
The applications for the little kids were fine. But Roy Kincheloe found himself slipping gift requests for older kids to the bottom of the pile. He couldn’t fill them. Everyone, it seems, likes to donate cute baby toys.
Toys for Tots needs basketballs, games and other toys for kids ages 10-12. Remember when you were 11? Now go out and find the toy you liked and drop it in a Toys for Tots bin.
Home for Christmas
The rush was on to finish Habitat for Humanity’s first duplex in North Idaho by Christmas. The walls are up, the floors are in and the dedication is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday.
More than 100 volunteers labored on the new home for Nick and Alanna Sell and their baby girl and Larry and Lillian Booth and their three boys. The duplex is on the corner of Ninth and Grant in Post Falls. Stop by, check out the work, cheer the volunteers and buy a Habitat celebrity cookbook for $13 (or more, if you’d like).
What’s your favorite first-home story? Hammer out your tale for Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene, ID 83814; fax to 765-7149; call 765-7128; or e-mail to cynthiat@spokesman.com. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo