Twas the week before Christmas, and through the workshop,
Not a creature was gluing, not even a drop.
All the clamps were hung ’round the workbench with care,
In hopes that some new wood soon would be there.

I don’t imagine any portly red-suited man will be bringing me anything this year. Not surprising, since I don’t even know anyone with a white beard.

This year has been a special challenge for getting gifts for my kids. None of them seem to want anything. I, however, find it practically impossible to believe they want nothing, since they are kids and the nature of kids is to want stuff. Well, human nature seems to be to want stuff, whatever stuff it is, just more and more of it.

So, in spite of their reticence, they’ll be getting something.

Previously, I have endorsed making things for people as gifts. And I have done my share of that. I had plans to make a jigsaw puzzle for my daughter, from a photo glued on hardboard, which I have done in the past, but I didn’t get around to doing it. Just as well, she’d likely chew all the pieces into mush. Two-year-olds do that sort of thing.

This past week, my wife went to visit her parents. I would have gone with her, but I was supposed to be working. Now, it turned out, as it usually does, that nothing at work was actually ready, even though it was supposed to be. So, I decided to dig into a particular area of the house and get something done that’s been waiting a long time.

Four or five years ago, I renovated a bizarre hot-tub addition that was stuck on the front of the house. It wasn’t even open to the rest of the building, so I got rid of the wall, tore out the inside, rebuilt the exterior walls, relocated and replaced windows and doors, built up the floor (because it was 5 inches below the floor of the house), and eventually painted it. It’s now the dining/craft room (my wife is a painter). Anyway, when I finished it, I had three windows taking up the wall that faced the street. Not having a curtain rod or good curtains, I drove a couple of 3 inch screws just above the window moulding and suspended a strip of wood from which I hung three old curtains that were too long. I folded the bottoms up and stapled them to shorten. It was a temporary thing, you know. Just to cover the windows.

Like I said, four or five years ago. Oddly enough, they didn’t go anywhere in all that time.

My wife, of course, hated the curtains.

Perhaps three years ago, I decided to replace the curtain rod (strip of wood) with something better. Not finding a rod long enough (90 inches), I bought some conduit and painted it brown. Of course, I had to wait for the paint to completely dry before installing it….

My wife purchased curtains that were too long a month or so ago. She started to hem them (as in, she cut them off) but they’ve stayed in a box ever since. So, I took advantage of her trip and my lack of work and decided, as a Christmas gift and a surprise for her return, to finish putting them up.

I happen to have a sewing machine. I bought it at the same place I’ve bought lots of other stuff for next to nothing. So, I set it up on the dining room table. I dragged the ironing board up from the storage room and plugged in the iron John bought almost 15 years ago for edge banding on cabinets we were building at the time. I decided to go quickly to the hardware store to buy a pair of good scissors.

They don’t sell scissors at the hardware store. Why don’t they sell scissors at the hardware store? Nevermind….

Here’s the procedure: you measure the amount to cut off the curtain, mark it, cut it off, then iron over the hem twice and pin it every few inches. Then you run it through the sewing machine and cut off the thread at the end.

All day long.

It took over 10 hours for me to hem 10 curtains. You see, I had other windows I had to do, that I’d been ignoring hopefully for years.

Every single time I started the cloth through the machine, the thread pulled out of the needle and disappeared into the miraculous winding convoluted path of obfuscation that is obviously necessary for it to travel in order to work. Many of you are likely unfamiliar with putting thread on a sewing machine. It has to twist and turn, go over and under, lace through and between a number of different obstacles before it reaches its goal: the eye of the needle. That eye is marginally bigger than the thread itself and my hands are not those of a surgeon, they can’t be held as steady as a dead turtle, so it takes some time to get the thread back through that little hole when it leaps out.

But I prevailed. I even installed my conduit above the windows. I bought some plumbing stand offs for three-quarter inch pipe at the hardware store and used them to install it.

My wife was thrilled when she returned.

And that’s all that matters about gift giving, isn’t it? That you go through an endless amount of torture to make someone smile a little….