Kids make unique decorations

Maiya Mosley, a 5-year-old kindergarten student at Clippard Elementary School, carefully coated the bottom of a sugary green gumdrop with thick, white icing and placed it next to a corner of her small graham cracker house.

Then she looked back at her mother, Tanya Mosley, pointed to her creation and said with a big smile: "Look, it's a bush. It's a little green bush, Mom."

The cold, wet weather Thursday night couldn't keep 100 Clippard Elementary School students and their parents and siblings from going to school to make tasty gingerbread houses.

The annual event, Gingerbread House Family Fun Night, was sponsored by Caring Communities. It was the first Christmas event of the year for many of the children.

As 9-year-old Katie Scowden, a fourth-grader, wiped away a glob of icing that had found its way into her hair, she said in the next few weeks she will make Christmas ornaments and decorations at school to take home and put on her tree -- ornaments like Popsicle-stick reindeer and angels that her mother, Lura Scowden, puts on display every year.

Fun night coordinator Cindy Schmoll said Thursday's event was meant to bring the families together for a night of fun and decorating.

Parents watched as their children created chimneys, windows and lawn decorations for their houses with peppermints, red licorice, pretzels and marshmallows.

When the houses were complete the children sat back, licked their fingers clean and grinned at their sugary creations.

Some, like Scowden, planned to admire the house only for a while and eat it once she got home. Others, like 3-year-old Shane Wright, whose brother Jake is a second-grader at Clippard, planned to keep his house and put it out for Santa to see when he delivers toys on Christmas Eve.

Over the next few weeks students not only in Cape Girardeau schools but all over Southeast Missouri will convert ordinary household objects into elaborate Christmas decorations.

Lynne Taylor, an art teacher at Scott City Elementary School, said the third-through-sixth- graders are already working on angel, Santa, elf and bell ornaments made from paper plates, doilies, paper towel tubes and cotton balls.

"The kids really love to make the ornaments each year," Taylor said. "When they're done with them we hang some of each kind on the school Christmas tree, and then before Christmas break they take them home and put them on their own trees.

Students in Susan Koch's second-grade class at Nell Holcomb Elementary School also will make ornaments to take home.

But Koch hasn't told her students yet. "I can't tell them too far ahead of time," she said. "If I tell them now, they'll want to do it now and they won't let it down until we do it."

Koch's students will make ornaments next week from metal juice lids with their pictures in the center and ribbons around the rim.

"I have three children," the first-year teacher said. "And I love it when they bring home ornaments they've made, especially the ones with pictures."

Koch isn't the only one who likes homemade ornaments.

Mary Spell, a grandmother in Cape Girardeau, loves the ornaments her children and grandchildren have made her over the years so much that her tree is covered with them every year.

"Probably 50 percent of the ornaments are ones that the kids and grandkids made," she said. "And the others are ones that we've picked up on family vacations to places like Washington, D.C., and Florida.

"You can't put just anything on a family Christmas tree," she said.

About 11 years ago Spell tried to put up a decorative tree with ribbons and bows instead of the usual tree decorated with family ornaments. "But when the kids all came home for Christmas they yelled, 'Where are our ornaments?'" she said.

Every year since she has hauled out the Popsicle sticks, snowmen made from socks and orange juice cans wrapped in yarn to put on the tree.

"They get more special every year," she said. "I like them better than Hallmark."

hkronmueller@semissourian.com

335-6611 ext. 128