The World on a String

For Christmas 2006, my family decided we were done with presents. All those painful hours with pretentious know-it-all Williams Sonoma customers, who just have to offer their advice, trying to find the perfect $80 cheese knife for my brother only to show up Christmas morning broke and exhausted to find my parents got him the same thing, both of them all wrong for his latest culinary project. None of this is exactly conducive to peace on Earth and goodwill to all and with most of us kids now between the ages of 21 and 31, living in boxes referred to in air quotes as "apartments" and coming into the holidays with the personal finances of grad students, well it just seemed like a good time to call it quits on the fancy presents, write a check to some do-gooders and actually spend the day enjoying each other's company. We still do gifts, but there's a $5 limit on everything. So this year, attempting to make the holiday a really special one, I learned to knit.

Turns out knitting isn't as blissfully domestic as one might think. My first stitches were accompanied by streams of obscenities as I fought knots in the yarn, dropped loops, and the mysterious ability of early incarnations of a "scarf" to double in width. I live with a preschooler so the process was made more exacerbating by the rules of propriety around children demanding that I spell everything out: "f-u-c-k-ing yarn! Why won't you just loop around the g-o-d-d-a-m-n needle like you're f-u-c-k-ing supposed to? You piece of s-h-i-t!"

But after a couple of weekends worth of Gilmore Girls reruns to provide a calming influence (that Rory) even stitches and consistent rows began appearing from the points of my needles. Truly no one was more shocked than I. As a kid I resisted all attempts to domesticate, preferring flooding the sandbox with my cousins to the tedium of waiting for dough to rise. Even more miraculously, the project began to develop a soothing rhythm. I found myself able to carry on conversations in polite company while casting on.

By Christmas Eve, I was tying off the final scarf--a hunter green checkerboard pattern for my youngest brother that a friend assured me had a manly air to it. I arrived Christmas morning, packages in hand. The family was in on the project and as it got closer to December 25, they began sending me purling tips and yarns far in excess of the $5 limit. Still, I think it was a shock to all as they unwrapped their gifts from the semi-nomadic member of the family that can change a tire unassisted in minutes, but can't bake a lasagna to save her life. My Grandma, who is convinced I'm headed straight for Hell by way of the liberal media (she believes the desk at Fox News holds the key to my redemption), kept saying: "I can't believe you can do this" over and over.

It's really nice that we have something to share. In fact, it felt so d-a-m-n good I spent New Year's with Angel reruns expanding my repertoire to hats.