Artisanal puppets anyone? (Holiday grace)

Marsha at Hot Water Bath echoes something we've said here before in her post Plus ça change :

"Who among us wants to be the one who tells a working-two-minimum-wage-jobs mom that she needs to be getting online (digital divide, anyone?) and ordering artisanal puppets for her children because that's better for the environment....Or that she should kitting up to make those puppets, with the required expenses of fabric and glue gun and needle because that's what moms of yesteryear would have done....Meanwhile, the dollar store has adorable puppets in a range of styles that are deemed by a privileged class to be less-than because of where they were made or how much energy they required to get here. Well, that's not a conversation that I am willing to have."

Last Christmas we did make a lot of our gifts (more, more, more). It was just that kind of a year. I posted some frugal thoughts about it afterwards.

But other years we have depended heavily on the dollar store.

And we have occasionally bemoaned the trend to artisanal-and-homemade (anybody else getting tired of that word artisanal?) that's so artisanal-and-homemade that even regular-old-homemade doesn't cut it.

But, as one woman put it in a Canadian Living article several years ago--Christmas "isn't about the flippin' wrapping paper." Or the flippin' cookies. Or where the flippin' hand puppets come from, although it's true enough that how we shop or where we shop for holidays does say something about our worldview (and that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown).

Christmas is about grace.

(As an update on that last link...when I read Shepherds Abiding last Christmas, I hadn't read any of the later (or earlier) books in the Mitford series. I didn't know that the character "hammering down on a cashew"--the one who unexpectedly points out the need for grace--would die in the next book. But somehow it adds even more poignancy to his words.)