Grandpa’s Christmas Workshop
Saturday night and Sunday afternoon were spent toiling away in my workshop, cobbling together the raw parts for a set of Christmas gifts for my two sons and daughter-in-law.
I am indeed a cheap weasel, but my goal was not to transform scrap plywood into inexpensive presents doomed to a landfill, but to help the grandkids make something for their moms an dads. Both my boys work hard and their kids love them. I wanted to give them the opportunity to express that love with their hands and spend some “grandpa” time with them.
You would be surprised how much time it takes to plan out six individual gifts. Two gifts, three times each. 30 parts, paint, brushes, rags, rollers, glue, nails screws – the list is pretty lengthy. Cutting, gluing, painting – I spent a good 12 hours on my feet on concrete listening to Internet radio and transforming scraps into kits.
Codey and Kaleb did their mommy’s present first. We screwed together the parts, and they painted their little brains out. Codey is a one-color kind of guy, whereas Kaleb is more adventuresome. He isn’t done until he has all the paint he needs for a lovely shade of battleship gray. Kaylee went the monochrome route too.
Kaylee is still just 10, but she really enjoys working on such projects. She’ll clamber up onto my workbench to more easily handle the big cordless drill. “Did you make this table?” she asked, bouncing on it to test it’s strength. I answered “yes”, and she seemed duly impressed before returning to drilling and driving screws.
For my part, I tend to focus entirely too much on precision and quality. Kaylee made her father’s present, which required a good deal of painting. We used a small roller. I noted that when she applied paint to the roller, she dipped it rather than “loading” it, rolling it into the paint and distributing the paint all over the roller before painting your object. I carried this lesson over to the younger cousins and loaded the roller first. Kaleb asked poignantly why “Kaylee got to do the paint all by herself”. Little escapes their attention, and nothing escapes their sense of justice. I told him because it was because I love her more, and he gave me a look that said “You’ll get yours, old man”.
If I were a UAW worker earning average wages those 12 hours would have been worth well over a thousand dollars. 12 hours worth of patent illustrations (one of my little sidelines) would have netted even more. If I had a project worth a thousand dollars, I probably would have done it instead if I had to choose. There are many needs among my family and friends, and to honor the brutal truth, I like making money. I am frankly grateful to a loving God I did not, happy to have spent my time earning a great deal more.
