Ideas For an Arts & Crafts Holiday

Okay, so we survived Thanksgiving, but, then, just how hard can it be to spend four days eating turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberries, and pumpkin pie?

The big challenge is yet to come: Hanukah and Christmas.

And, of course, the Big Box stores didn’t even wait for the Thanksgiving turkey to cool before they started blasting us with their door buster deals and every other marketing gimmick they could dream up, anything to lure us into their neon caverns and sticky webs of stuff designed to self-destruct in time for us to want (I almost wrote “need”) another one next December.

This is the week when we need to make our first pre-New Year’s Day resolution: to make this an Arts and Crafts holiday for as many people as possible on our gift list.

And here then, just to get you started thinking about the possibilities, are a few Arts and Crafts ideas guaranteed to not only set you apart from all other gift givers in your family, but to do your part in strengthening the Arts and Crafts movement and giving someone special a gift as unique as they are (and that does not require sixteen AA batteries, which you forgot to buy):

* a magazine subscription to American Bungalow, Arts & Crafts Homes, or Old House Journal;

* a membership in the American Art Pottery Association, which also includes their quarterly Journal;

* a piece of art pottery, hand-hammered jewelry, textile, woodblock print, furniture, or art tile from either an antiques dealer or from a living craftsperson;

* one of the above which you have made;

* a workshop class where they can make one of the above at the Grove Park Inn Arts and Crafts Conference;

* a two-night, three-day Arts and Crafts Weekend Package at the Grove Park Inn for the February 21-23 national Arts and Crafts Conference and Antiques Show;

* tickets to the Craftsman Farms Afield trip May 20-23 to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago and Crab Tree Farms, arranged through Arts & Crafts Tours;

* a donation in their name to the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms;

* a weekend get-away at the Roycroft Inn on the historic Roycroft Campus in East Aurora, N.Y.;

* admission to an Arts and Crafts historic site close to where the person on your list lives, such as the Gamble House (Pasadena), the Riordan Mansion (Flagstaff), or one of the many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings (everywhere, almost) open to the public;

* a book about the Arts and Crafts movement (anything except “Loving Frank“);

And if you have an idea that didn’t appear here, please email it to me and I’ll add it to our list on next Monday’s column.

Head, Heart and Hand:

Together we grow stronger.

– Bruce

PS – As if you did not know it, you can find information on everything on this list simply by doing a quick search on the internet.