Let’s do this together

Driving to London on Saturday morning to bring my mum our old telly, I used the time sat in traffic jams constructively to start planning my Christmas shopping list… or rather, my Christmas making list.

I was mercifully free from The Dark Lord for a few hours, so I could listen to the “boring” radio and have a proper brain-storming session for this year’s “craft Christmas”.

Two words that have previously been enough to strike terror into my heart.

But that’s because I’ve had some terrible homemade presents in the past from my nearest and dearest, which has put me off ever doing anything too rustic.

There was the freshly made face cream that went sour in the fridge and turned into cat sick. The gin-flavoured bath oil that I poured in the bath and made me smell like an alcoholic.

And my best mate Ali’s homemade sloe gin, which took the roof off my mouth and got repurposed as paint stripper.

The Dark Lord is particularly useless at sewing and I remember one year she made everyone lavender bags, which split in my drawers – the wooden kind. But I was still finding bits of dried flower in my undercrackers for months after that.

When I got home from trying to convince my mum that the telly didn’t need a wire hanger-style aerial any more, I started researching how-to videos on my laptop for homemade Christmas crackers and decorations.

Although quite frankly, it looks like just a single cracker would take me about a week to produce. I suppose I could make enough for the family in time for NEXT Christmas.

My other cunning idea was to make eco-friendly wax wraps for keeping food fresh instead of tin foil, but to keep costs down, I wondered if I should recycle some of our old linen and clothes rather than buying cotton.

I mentioned this to The Dark Lord, who thought it was a brilliant idea and offered some of her old death metal T-shirts.

“Thanks – but they’re supposed to cover food, not scare it,” I said, and turned back to my laptop.

But she was trying to be helpful for a change and offered: “We could always make fudge like we did a couple of years ago.”

I turned to her, and replied with heavy irony: “Oh yes, THAT Christmas. The one I spent £30 on ingredients and got third-degree burns from boiling toffee which had turned into napalm.

“Only for you to pass them off as your own hard work, you big cheat.”

Are you having a crafty Christmas? Tell us your clever ideas so that I can shamelessly pass them off as my own to family and friends. Ahem! Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.

Please note, if you send us photos of your grandchildren, we’ll also need permission of one of their parents to print them... Thanks!