Posts Tagged ‘Hillary Clinton Christmas Ornaments
Hillary and Sarah Christmas ornaments: a crafts project for you
Here’s something we’ll mention now, so you can keep it in mind as you holiday shop — it’s something we started doing during the leadup to the 2008 Iowa caucus that we’ve kept doing ever since, for Arts & Crafts Day here at Buzzquarters.
There’s a thrift shop down the street from us called The Brown Elephant here in Boystown, which is an AIDS charity supporting shop on Halsted that has some pretty remarkable stuff at times (we’ve gotten Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, and vintage Armani jackets from there, for about $8 or $10 each).
One of our best finds happened the week before we were heading out to Iowa for the first time to campaign for Hillary Clinton in November of 2007, when we bought a bunch of Christmas ornaments from there: simple blue and silver balls, six to a box, for something like $1.25 a box. It looked like a card store or something went out of business and they donated their stock to Brown Elephant. That, or someone died and all their Christmas decorations were donated when their apartments were cleaned out. This is, unfortunately, a hazard of shopping at any thrift shop — there are ghosts lurking around a lot of this stuff if your imagination’s the kind that finds them.
We spotted those bulbs and knew immediately what we were going to do with them: we had rolls of Hillary for President round campaign stickers, so we took a sticker and placed it neatly on the blue and silver bulbs and made our first Hillary ornaments. Then, we took some spray glue and a little glitter we had laying around (because, of course, a bunch of gay guys always have plenty of glitter laying around, you know, for emergencies) and we were cranking out Hillary ornaments left and right.
We took them to Iowa with us and passed them out when we were walking door to door. At first, we were going to bake Hillary cupcakes or her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but we wondered how receptive strangers would be to eating things someone brought to their door. We personally wouldn’t. But the ornaments were cute, and almost every house we went to in Iowa had a Christmas tree up. Since the Iowa caucus was early in January, and the trees were still up until mid-January or so, the Hillary supporters or Hillary leaners would have a little bit of Hillary in their homes, staring at them every day from their trees, right up until the caucus.
And the ornaments were clearly hand-made by us, so they were very personal. We only gave them to people we made real connections with, and on caucus night quite a few people came up to us and said, “Oh, yeah guys! We got your ornaments on our tree! Go Hillary go!”
We mention this now because if you are a Sarah Palin supporter, you might want to start stocking up on simple bulbs like we did if you see them on sale. Since there are no Palin 2012 stickers out yet, you can use pictures you find of her in magazines and decoupage the ornaments. Maybe we could even find some good photos of Sarah and make some templates for you that you could then just print out and put right onto the ornaments you are making.
January will be just two years before the next Iowa caucus. Just imagine how many ornaments you could make in that time, to have ready to go. If you aren’t planning on traveling to Iowa yourself, you could make them at home and then send them to the Palin offices when they open.
At the beginning of a campaign, especially, money is so tight…and things to give away to people are in such short supply. People wanted Hillary items and kept asking for them and asking for them but the campaign was not prepared in those early days.
What if, collectively, Palin supporters were proactive and started making these personal items now…so the campaign, when it gears up, has all this prep work done for them?
The cost really is very minimal too.
We plan on buying up as many of the sale Christmas bulbs we can find the moment they are marked down. We’re checking the thrift stores now, to see if people who’ve bought new bulbs are donating their old ones. We also keep checking the dollar stores for other small plastic hollow balls we can use to make ornaments.
Personally, we love crafting, so every year people we know get ornaments like this from us at Christmas time. That, or Hillary cupcakes if we run out of ornaments and bake instead. The people we care about deserve something more meaningul than something store bought at the holidays.
And we like knowing there’s Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton smiling at people we know on all their trees. Especially in the Republican households we know. People tell us guests come over and ask, “Why do you have Hillary Clinton ornaments on your tree?” and our friends say, “Oh, HillBuzz gave us those. Used to hate that woman, but she’s grown on us and now we say thank God for her, because we see her in a new light now”.
Just imagine if the same can be done for Sarah Palin, through a little bit of arts and crafts, a bit of foresight, and two years of spirited ornament making by her supporters.
You might not be able to put a copy of Going Rogue into every home in Iowa because of the cost involved, but at about thirty cents a piece (cost of bulbs + glitter + picture + glue) we could very easily, as a giant team, put a Sarah Palin Christmas tree ornament on every tree in Iowa.
It could actually be a fun national project for supporters to run together, so we hope our friends at Conservatives4Palin and TeamSarah see this and suggest it to their readers too.
And in case you are wondering, yes we are making Hillary for President ornaments too. Just in case a certain Secretary of Great needs them in 2012 herself.
