Origami Gifts

My fourth-born daughter has mad origami skills. 

Ever since she was a toddler hanging out at her older sisters' Girl Scout meetings, she has had an uncanny knack for seeing in her mind's eye how to bend the two-dimensional paper into intricate 3_D shapes. Her fingers are insanely skilled at folding with intense precision and managing the tiniest twists and tucks. And her memory retains countless patterns which she can fold up at a moment's notice. 

And while she often treats us to origami gifts - a set of puppy dog valentines when she was eight, several years's worth of help with my Ornament of the Year, and a set of boxes to fit over my twinkle lights - she also shares her gifts with the world. After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, she folded 200 tiny cranes in an afternoon and sent them off for a fundraising project. 

But most of the time, the process is more important than the product. Ever since high school, at church, my daughter quietly rips her worship folder into bitty squares and folds elephants, cranes, boxes, what have you, as she listens to the worship. Afterwards, she hands her creations to children or leaves them silently standing on a table for someone else to come and discover. 

Origami is a special part of my daughter's life. 

Origami meant something special to my grandmother too.

I remember with fascination an origami book that I found in her basement when I was probably five or six.. Complete with a set of exotic origami papers, this book became an obsession for me and I desperately wanted to figure out how to make the projects in the book.

I remember trying and trying to interpret the directions and make the right folds but failing very time.

I remember carrying the open book up the stairs with my failed attempts carefully balanced on the pages, and asking the grown-ups for help.

Although I don't recall her exact words, I remember my grandmother giving me the direct impression that this origami business was far too difficult for anyone to understand, let alone a child, and I should take the book back downstairs, put it away, and forget about origami altogether.

And I remember feeling a bit sad for my grandma. She obviously cared enough about learning origami to buy the book, which would have been considered a luxury. And as I considered her a capable grown up, I certainly expected she was clever enough to figure it out. But for whatever reason, she had given up. And that seemed incomprehensible to my childhood self.

So as I watch my daughter sit and quietly fold the complex, masterful shapes like the ones she has conquered this week, I think about my grandmother.

And I imagine how impressed Grandma would be to see my daughter effortlessly folding up a storm of precise and perfect origami shapes, far more intricate and challenging that the ones in her old origami book. I think she would be very proud to see her frustrated dreams come true in her great granddaughter's gift for origami.  

And that is something very special to me. 

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If you'd like to see more of my daughter's origami magic, check these out:

A set of boxes she helped me fold to decorate the twinkle lights in my kitchen window

More origami boxes on twinkle lights around my fireplace mantle.

My origami squirrel,

Tiny little elephants for our 2011 Ornament of the Year.

A hanging group of paper cranes she folded when she was ten. 

More paper cranes, these folded from graph paper.

More boxes on twinkle lights, these red for Valentine's Day.