Holiday Robots
Each year, just after Thanksgiving, my wife Lisa announces her plans for the Holiday dinner table where we gather Christmas Eve to celebrate the season. No small endeavor, and not to be taken lightly, Lisa usually has 2 or 3 concepts that she experiments with in the weeks leading up the debut of the centerpiece and flanking place settings.
This year, it was between gold fish and robots. Based on experience and respecting the creative process, I rarely voice a preference as she works through the concepts. One day she and the kids came in from a trip to the pet store, introducing me to three gold fish who were taking up residence in large glass candle holders on the dining room table. Several types of “gravel” were attempted. Live flowers were arranged under water. Candles were introduced in a thinner glass column giving the fish aquatic ambience. The first week, one of the fish died from the excitement. The next week, another fish started moving a little slower. Never quite right, the theme did not take hold. Disaster struck when a freak wind storm knocked out our island’s power for 7 days, plummeting indoor temperatures below 32 degrees and spelling doom for the two remaining fish friends.
The second concept, always favored as her leading candidate, won out. Our house has been robot-obsessed for quite some time now. My eldest son loves to draw them, paint pictures of them, collect tin robot toys and read about them. So Lisa commissioned him to create a unique robot portrait for each guest, which was scanned and placed into a printed name card set at everyone’s place. She took the kids to the local hardware store to pick out unusually large nuts, bolts, nails and screws which served as napkin rings. The centerpiece was appropriately elaborate, with a vase containing stems of colored glass balls on flexible coiled wire. Colored toy robots guarded the arrangement from all sides, and the table shimmered with several mercury glass votive candles.
Everyone loved their personalized robots, which my son created to reflect some characteristic of each family member. The nuts and bolts, along with the metal robots, have since been recycled as toys. We can all hardly wait for next year’s theme… who knows, maybe the year of the pig will give way to the year of the goldfish.