When it comes to Christmas, my husband Mark always wins. He’s just a more thoughtful gift giver than I am.
I hate that.
I wanted Christmas 2019 to be different. I decided I would paint Mark a scene taken from a photo of our backyard: the old horse barn, at dusk, partly obscured by a stand of black locust trees. The beauty of my art would outdo anything he might give me.
Too bad I don’t know how to paint.
Well, that’s not true. Last year, though unskilled, I painted a landscape scene of a field not far from our house. And it came out well. I assumed this meant I possessed innate artistic talent.
Nope.
It might’ve helped if I’d had a real easel for this next project. I had to make do with a built-in one attached to my daughter’s childhood art box. At eight inches high, it was nowhere near large enough to hold up my 24-by-36-inch canvas.
I did scrounge up an expandable window screen that, when balanced just right on the lip of the tiny easel, could support the height and width of the canvas, but it left little of the lip for the canvas itself. The slightest jostle dislodged both the painting and screen with a clatter, throwing paints, palette and brushes in all directions.
I am almost certain Mary Cassatt never had to work under such conditions.
Another problem, an artistic one, was the composition. I couldn’t figure out how to place the barn for best effect, so I just plonked it dead center. I was shooting for “aesthetically pleasing,” but I landed on “uninspired and artless.”
Further, the breezy approach I had taken with my landscape painting last year didn’t lend itself to architecture. I didn’t think to use a straight-edge. I didn’t measure. I just eyeballed the general shape of a barn and hoped the perspective lines converged somewhere in space.
They did not.
There was no way to fix this disaster, so I procrastinated until Christmas Eve Day, when I planned to add the black locusts in the foreground and call the painting done. Rather than staying faithful to the photo, I went rogue, sticking made-up trees wherever they could best disguise the barn’s shortcomings.
But it was no use. The cupola sat 15 feet from its rightful place in the center of the ridge. The windows appeared to be melting off the building. The way the trapezoidal walls defied physics would have made M.C. Escher wince.
The kind of horse you’d find in a barn like that would have both of its eyes on the same side of its head.
Around 2 p.m., I went into a full panic. Desperate, I painted out the entire middle third of the canvas and set about refilling it with a more plausible barnlike structure.
But time was short and I was stressed. The new barn looked even less realistic than the old. The gracefully tapering tree branches I had originally made came back as popsicle sticks. And, with my frantic brushstrokes, the canvas crashed off the easel every few minutes.
At 4 p.m., Mark’s truck pulled into the driveway. No!
I hid the painting, such as it was, and conceded defeat. By the time Mark walked in the door, I was sobbing. Christmas was ruined.
He hugged me and said the painting was probably better than I thought. He begged me to wrap it up and surprise him anyway. 
It was his only present; what else could I do?
Christmas morning, the dreaded moment arrived. With a sigh, I shoved the painting at Mark. He tore off the paper, and everyone stared at it.
For a long time.
Sure, they recognized the barn. But it looked like something the inebriated love child of Picasso and Grandma Moses might have painted while riding a horse with a limp.
Trying to help, someone said, “Well, if a person who didn’t know anything about art saw it, they might not think it was that bad.”
And even that was more praise than the piece deserved.
Just then, Mark reached behind the couch and pulled out a big, heavy box. For me.
It was something he had made in his shop: a birdseye maple tabletop easel designed for larger pieces. The honey-colored wood glowed in the morning light.
“I just thought you might need something like this,” he said, with genuine affection in his voice.
Naturally, I began to cry.
The jerk had won Christmas again.