From The Work Of Your Own Hands

 This is the last post of mine for 2025. I wanted to combine reminiscing from the previous couple of weeks of school with some memories of this year's family Christmas celebration. At the risk of repeating the theme of a post I wrote in July of this year (called "Rediscovering the Joy of Creation"), I wanted to focus on the extreme satisfaction you can achieve when you build or make something by yourself.

The Rods and Connectors Duplex

During the last two weeks of school for 2025, people were getting sick left, right, and center. Usually, we are fortunate enough to have sufficient occasional teacher coverage, but we were overwhelmed with absences. To ensure teachers did not miss their preparation time, I took two classes simultaneously in the library. Supervising over forty children at a time meant that my regularly scheduled programming had to take a back seat. Instead, the students were given rods and connectors and asked to build a structure, together. The first three images below were from the first afternoon we started.

The students loved this project! Some would start on their own and then join their cube to someone else's. They saw how powerful it was to combine forces and resources, and they got excited to see how large it became. It grew... and grew... and grew! It grew so large that students needed to stand on chairs to reach the top. It grew so large that students would inspect the foundation to ensure things weren't getting loose. It grew so large that we had to dismantle the rods and connectors furniture others had built (i.e. a table, chair, and TV) because we ran out of rods to add to the walls. 

The students were sad to take it down, but thanks to Mrs. Ngo's Grade 1-2 students on the last day of school, we carefully dismantled it.

The Garlic Pork

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a cook. However, I try my best to continue a cultural tradition my parents passed along to me - the preparation of the Christmas garlic pork. It's tedious, and a bit smelly, and the end product is definitely an acquired taste, but I'm proud when I taste the results and it's edible. I guess it's more meaningful for me because it takes so much effort and this is outside my area of expertise. I cooked it on Boxing Day this year.

The Cross Fit Canuck Snowman Workout

Every year around this time, our "box" (the term for a Cross Fit gym, often because it's in a warehouse-like boxy space) has a workout that gets the participants to build parts of a snowperson using equipment found in the gym. This was our contribution in 2023. The picture below was the snow person we made in 2024. (It's not posted anywhere else, so I had to immortalize it somehow.)

There must be something conditioned in my psyche - since my muscles are quite conditioned yet! - that readied me for this challenge, because a week before we had this same workout, I dreamed of how we would build our snowperson at the gym for this year! Don't tell my coaches, but it helps make the workout less painful. My husband and I were partners and we ended up making two snow folks for 2025.

(Big thanks to Coach Ann for taking this photo of us below with our "main" snowman and posting it to the Cross Fit Canuck Facebook page.)

It's goofy, but I have fun building a snowman with gym equipment. It exercises those creativity muscles as well as the physical ones I possess.

My Sister's Modified Song Lyric Gift

Christmas was special this year because my sister and her husband traveled all the way from Calgary. The last time Mary Carol was in Ontario for Christmas was 2020, but that doesn't really count, since the pandemic forced us to keep apart. The last Christmas we actually spent face-to-face was in 2017. She stayed with us for a few days beforehand, while her husband drove way up north to see his family. Mary made her special fudge, which I seem incapable of making. Delicious!

On Christmas Day itself, we wore matching PJ pants and custom-made shirts that Mary and Donald specifically designed for every member of the family. 

Mary goes all out for Christmas, and even had a theme to her gift purchases. (Cue the teacher in the movie "A Christmas Story" announcing that she wants her students to write a theme.) This year's theme was "food". In addition to her many, many gifts, Mary wrote us a song, to be performed at Christmas. Her song this year was to the Billy Joel tune, "We Didn't Start the Fire". If she's able to, she will send me a digital copy of the lyrics so I can share them here. I was going to type them out but it's four pages long with seven verses!

It took Mary a long time to work out the lyrics to her song. She had to listen to the original song over and over to remember the rhythm and cadence. Could she have had Generative AI create the song? Probably? Would it have been quicker to complete? Most definitely? But it would not have been as rewarding. I don't want this to be an anti-AI rant, but I desperately hope that technology does not take from us the willingness to make or do things that are time-intensive. Let us draw and write, sing and dance, not always because we have to, but because we want to. Did you see this article from December 19, 2025 about a singer having robot back-up dancers? What's next?

Thanks to everyone who has made 2025 a good year for me. Stay safe and we'll see you in 2026!