All Is Creative: Even Christmas Cookies.

A little holiday creativity from SpiritSentient. (Fonceca cookie-cutting tools pictured.)

Osho, a (highly controversial) spiritual master, says in his book, Creativity Unleashed:

"Creativity has nothing to do with any activity in particular — with painting, poetry, dancing, singing — it has nothing to do with anything in particular. Anything can be creative; it is you who brings that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way, you can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way, you can cook in a creative way. Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach — how you look at things."

I feel he has hit it pretty much spot on. Anything and everything can be creative in every moment, in every breath, even destruction.

I’m going to share a personal family experience, that I always find to be absolutely amazing. Every December, my Mom makes a particular recipe of short-bread dough, with incredible finesse, and then deposits it in front of my siblings, Father and I along with some cookie cutters. The pre-made shapes are merely an appetizer, because we always end up carving our incredibly complex ideas for Christmas cookies out of the simplistic dough.

Pictured above, from Fonceca Christmas 2002, we have the hyper-l33t (what is l33t?) cookie and what I believe was an eagle (apparently with heavily clumped and tumourous feathers — it was quite the task to create an organic shape like an eagle out of dough and it turned out pretty nice with icing below). Worthy of note: Short-bread dough is a difficult and unforgiving medium to sculpt with, and on top of that all we have are steak knives, butter knives, and toothpicks to help us.

Next up we have some beautiful creative portraits, both from the mind of my sister no doubt, she is by far the most adept and ambitious short-bread sculptor, generally putting us all to shame with actual recognizable portraiture in dough. Okay, granted, MJ is a bit rough and looks like a melting alien, but couldn’t that be considered kind of true-to-life?

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And some more portrait brilliance from Megs, this time we have the often proudly quirky Bjork (who I think would be tickled to have a cookie in her honor, even if it is barely recognizable — that’s part of the fun of creativity: whacked out experiments!) and that kid from the oblongs whose name I forget Milo from the Oblongs (an animated show that started out with a small audience and cancellations but eventually got recognition on Adult Swim — interesting note: Bob Oblong is voiced by Will Ferrell.) *Also, when Megs saw this picture from way back when, she did not recall creating a Bjork cookie at all…

A Christmas "Shank" or "Shiv", and to go with it a wounded short-bread man with a gaping abdominal slash. Some people may find our concept of creative Christmas cookies to be horrifying, grotesque, and/or offensive… and they’re usually the same people who don’t find Monty Python, South Park, or Aqua Teen Hunger Force Funny, nor do they actually allow themselves to ‘have fun.’

Below are the iced versions of two Fonceca X-mas staples: the Bloodshot Christmas Eye, and the EasyBake Oven. The eye seems to become more and more real and impressive looking every year (wish I could dig up more pictures,) and the EasyBake is an amazing concotion of Nick’s prank-driven mind. Its a cookie, hollowed out and filled with an unpleasant (for most people) amount of icing, then covered with a short-bread lid and RE-iced so it once again appears to be one solid iced cookie. Offering a tin of cookies to guests is often like russian roulette, we all wait to see who reaches in and picks out the EasyBake booby-trap. I’ve now just given this away, but I bet it’ll be chosen regardless

The rest of these are from 2005 or newer. Very often we’ll create recognizable shapes from pop-culture. I think its probably because we all get kind of a charge of coming up with an obscure pop culture reference and then yelling it out to others with ‘Christmas’ as a pre-fix. For example: "I’m gonna make a Christmas Pac-Man!" or "I’ve got it! Oh yeah, this is gonna be awesome… Christmas Handbanana! [NSFW, full-episode, hahahaha]" (Handbanana is a cameo character from the Adult Swim cartoon series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, by brilliant comedy creators Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro.

And some more of the same… indie/cult superhero The Maxx (though with mixed up colors, another casualty of off-the-cuff random cookie fun) created by Sam Kieth (who has been featured on this site before in the creative artists section), as well as Casey Jones of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame (a throwback to our child-hood, very much like these cookies themselves.)

Ok, prepare thyselves, below are some Christmas cherries that MAY have started out as… er… something else.      Oh yeah, and there’s a damaged MechWarrior as well.

This post is coming to a close as we look at Jean-Luc Picard pre-icing, and post-icing, along with an army of X-mas ninjas (if you look really closely, one of the ninjas appears to be missing an armband, the reason is, he’s an injured, one-armed, amputee ninja) and a Christmas Tadpole — but if you really think about it, how many people do you know who would put looking foolish aside and tackle a portrait in short-bread? How many would have a fun, mind-stretching experience… just making cookies? Well, whatever the answer, I feel like the world could definitely use some more, so I post this in order to inspire. Scroll down for my favourite cookie of all.

Here we go…

The next cookie was an absolute brilliant idea from my brother Drew (who is an awesome martial artist himself), but it was one he chose not to bring to life because the dough was drying and not co-operating. Megs volunteered to tackle it and Mom offered to touch up the dough… and so it began. Presenting my sister’s latest and greatest cookie-creation: A Christmas Ryu in ShoRyuKen pose. This isn’t my favourite because I like Street Fighter, but because it looks so good. The detail on the bandana, the chocolate sprinkles belt, and the streaming blue-pink energy from his arm and hand are incredible to me, and hey, i believe Street Fighter 4 is on the horizon, isn’t it?

Note: I was unable to find a picture of Ryu actually executing an uppercut (despite its common use in-game), but I did find this amazing artwork of Ryu by Jo Chen, an excellent comic/manga artist, who’s done a lot of work for Joss Whedon franchises.

This is just an example of how any act can be creative. Is there something you love to do? Do it creatively. Is there something you hate doing? Perhaps try a creative take on it and see if it ends up being much more enjoyable.