This is my mothers stocking stuffer from last year. Because people celebrate the Day of the Dead the first week of November it is late. But I just found the picture and I still think it was the greatest gift for her ever. 
     You have to understand, Christmas at Mom's house is a little strange. My mother has a Christmas House collection. Not just any collection, it is packed in at least five large trunks. It takes all day to take it out of the boxes and set it up all around her house, and at least that long to put it away the day after Christmas. People have been sending her beautiful houses for years, so of course her adoring children have been trying to fix it for years.
     We have been competing for as long as I can remember to see who can give my mother the worst thing to add to the Christmas village. If you walk into my mothers house during the holidays at first glance it is a winter wonderland, and then you step a little closer. Something is just a little off, but you can't really tell what. So you side up to the bookcases with the Christmas houses all in a row, and that's when you start to notice the problems: Santa face down in the snow with chalk lines around him, The drunk in front of the church, garbage trucks, whore houses, a town dump, a haunted house, trash and debris (carefully crafted in porcelain and clay), rats, a car accident, a dog pound. I haven't begun to tell you the issues with her Christmas Collection.
     We try to hide it amongst the Christmas finery so she doesn't notice until we have been home a few days. Last year, I tried and tried to find a men in black figure.(this is one of her favorite movies) I was going to make a a huge monster coming off the wall onto her church steeple for the figure to be blasting at. I would have won.
      I could not find one anywhere, so instead I made her, her, own skeleton doll sticking out of her stocking Christmas morning. If family hadn't stayed up nights helping me glue in his individual hair plugs he never would have gotten done on time.
      He didn't get to be in the Christmas houses, but he did end up moving all around the house. She decided she liked him, a told us he was the favorite. So, like all jealous siblings we pretended to get rid of him. She spent the rest of the holiday "saving him". Of course we made sure she would catch us in the act so he would be okay, wink.We put him: in a pot on the stove, under her front tire, in the dryer, at the top of the stairs. We even taunted the dog with him. She took him to work and now her students have to wonder why there is a skeleton on her filing cabinet.
     What this has to do with writing and illustrating I don't know, but I did illustrate on him??? I am working on several of the pages in my Magazine today. Hope to have the articles on fairy hair braiding done this afternoon.