Reindeer Hospital

This afternoon I found two rather sad little reindeer tucked away in a shoe box and looking like they would miss out on Christmas this year. Long years ago my then young daughter had crafted triplet reindeer with cork heads and bodies, barbeque match legs, bead feet and antlers from something I can't now identify. The tiny  shoe box held a few token Christmas items that I kept after a massive downsize a few years ago when I was moving into a single room to take up my first post as a graduate teacher. I dragged them out the other day and noticed that two of the reindeer had suffered from the trauma of moving house thrice more since then, and suggested that David might be able to fix them with some TLC and glue. Unfortunately he's had the man-flu  for most of the past week and I blame that for said reindeer being shut back inside the box and returned to the shelf in my office. I had noticed the lone fit and well reindeer sitting forlorn in the kitchen next to the mug tree, doing its best to add some festive cheer, and thought that perhaps three cork and match stick reindeer might just have been more Christmas than he could take (it's still two and a half weeks away, after all). Today, though, the truth revealed itself (the broken ones hadn't been fixed!!) and I wondered for a brief moment what to do. 

Nope, I'm not being truthful. I looked at the poor wretched things adrift in the shoe box with a very cute golliwog Santa,  a hand knitted red and white doll mum gave me last Christmas and a Santa brooch made by a Queensland pal; I knew that I had some fixing to do. Pronto! I have a bottle of PVA glue on my desk so with a deft stroke of  black permanent marker, the shoe box was converted to a Reindeer Hospital. The other banished Christmas friends were quickly moved to perches in the bare twig tree I have arranged here on my desk and they seemed to feel most at home. Hospital established, I applied one squirt of glue to a broken antler, and another squirt of glue to a broken leg. I propped the little fellows gently against the inside of the box and waited a few hours and voila! They are like new again! Well, almost. Their wee googly eyes are tinged an aging yellow which I'm sure is just the ravages of time, but otherwise they look as spunky and cute as the day they were first made.

You can spend all you like on new things for Christmas. The shops will never (within reason) run out of things for you to spend your hard earned cash on. There's all sorts of stuff with varying degrees of wow factor...but I don't think you can beat something made by the hands of someone you love. I'll take some pictures and load them on tomorrow [finally got to it Wednesday!] for you to have a look...but for tonight I want to get this posted and find out if that new email subscribe button really works. I've subscribed just so that I can keep an eye on how things are working. Hope you're having fun getting ready for Christmas. Hope you're finding things you'd forgotten about during the year and that maybe this will inspire you to do a bit of fixing too, so that you can enjoy some of those old treasures for just a little longer. Or perhaps you'll create some new treasures from bits and pieces around the house. It just takes a bit of imagination and some time...and a willingness to experiment a bit and have fun! Wishing you luck and love and prosperity. Oh, and I hope David isn't going to mind having three little yellow eyed reindeer standing vigil under the mug tree tonight.