I helped at a cookie decorating table for kids today. It was a Halloween party. There were pumpkin-shaped cookies. And the whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about that poem I’ve seen, the one about the little boy who would draw the wildest things, and then he went to school and he was taught to draw the red flower with the green stem. Remember that poem? Yeah.
The adults were obsessed with how these kids were decorating their pumpkin cookies. Constant questions. “You want me to get you the green icing for the stem?” “Oh, don’t you want to give it a green stem?” “Here, let me give you a hand with that.” Parents looking at their child’s orange pumpkin with a green stem and saying “oh, I like the stem!”
No one complimented the ones that were different, the ones that were brown and orange and green frosting mashed together, with sprinkles scattered haphazardly on top. They weren’t rude about them, no. But there was very little praise for the artistry of those chaotic cookies. An “oh, look at that, you made an icing pile, you want to eat it?” perhaps. An encouraging voice. But no compliments.
I made a cookie for myself at one point. A brown pumpkin, with an orange stem. I wanted the brown icing, it was chocolate. And the stem…at that point I had heard too many people pushing for the green stem. Maybe I had to prove to myself that I still had my creativity. Maybe I was trying to prove to the kids that they could do it too. They could paint outside the lines. Their cookie didn’t have to look like all the others.
Their flower didn’t have to be red with a green stem.