I thought they were cute.  Maybe others disagreed.  But the notion of old glass dressed up and repurposed appealed to me.  I made 78 of them, each unique, with patches and stripes and twists and belts in pastels and bright colors.  My children helped me as we sat around the kitchen table with our diluted white glue and our strips of colored tissue, inventing patterns on the fly.  I bought 78 plastic flowers from a dollar store and planted them in the jars, filled with gravel.  I sold some.  I gave some away as gifts.  I put electric candles in them and arranged them to form a colorful lantern lane at Laura’s wedding.  And I put the leftovers in boxes which I stored in the garage, which I brought with me to Mom’s and Dad’s house, and which have been sitting idle in their basement.  The time had come either to throw them away or to give them away.  Later this afternoon I would decide.  For now, Hannah was playing in the wet snow rolling and assembling snowman parts, using Austrian pine needles as whiskers and pine cones for eyes, and an Olaf stick for a tuft of hair on top.  And I knew this was my chance to play, to turn away from my infinite chores and to play, to play with my daughter making snowmen and a fort, a massive fort, founded with spheres of heavy wet snow too large for three adults to roll any farther, a five-gallon bucket making big cylindrical bricks for walls with battlements on top.  And my son Caleb loved me enough to leap from the house barefoot and giggling to run madly in the snow and to tackle me with laughter and glee and rolling in the snow and throwing wet snow in each other’s faces and laughing like little boys—he loved me that much.  When they left to spend Christmas elsewhere, I sank back into that dark lonely place, knowing that to claw my way out on this Christmas eve I would be wise to find a way to look outward from myself to someone else, and those dusty papier mâché mayonnaise and pickle jars in their basement boxes came to mind.  While Mom made a list, I rushed to a dollar store for fresh plastic winter flowers and a bag of cheap gravel, and made 20 homemade vases to deliver on Christmas eve.  Mom beamed when I asked her to come with me and to navigate to her 20 chosen homes, where in the orange wisps of sunset I set the vases on doorsteps to be found on the eve or on the day of Christmas.