Honoring Creative Beginings

Why do you create?

Recently while looking through old Polaroids, I realized my crafty and creative beginnings were the early childhood days spent helping my mom make piñatas.

My family lived in Italy then South Carolina before we settled down in Jacksonville, Florida. We made piñatas at every stop along the way.

It all started with a "spider" that went awry and became a "California Raisin" (To explain all the wrinkles) for my twin brother's 8th birthday. From there we made and sold many piñatas- Care Bears, Ninja Turtles, My Little Ponies, Unicorns, Simpson's characters, stars, hot air balloons, snow men, blow fish, and more. They were all crafted from newspaper, flour, construction paper, and tissue paper. 

And isn't it ironic that we spent so much time crafting beautiful piñatas only so children could violently charge at them with baseball bats and beat them until they exploded with bits of rainbow colored candy?

I have so many memories of violent painful mistakes involving those baseball bats that make me laugh out loud as I type this.  Flying baseball bats and the painful collisions they caused were not funny for the child-victims at the time, but a decade later they are hilarious reminders of a childhood that wasn't pristine and "PC" like so many are now.

Mother and I work 50 hour weeks now. We haven't made a piñata in over a decade- not even for my niece's or nephew's birthdays. It's hard to force time for a project as time consuming as a piñata. But maybe this year. Maybe we'll make just one, to honor creative beginnings.

About my Ethnicity, My Ethnic FAQ at "Van's Story Time"