I typically give kid's crafts a pass. I mean, they're kids. Making stupid crafts is kind of your only option when you're a kid and you don't have the skill, patience, time, or budget to make decent crafts. But even so, the holiday favorite "orange studded with cloves" is a craft whose time has long since come and gone. This is one craft that has to end.
Problem #1 with this craft is that it never smells as nice as you think it will. I mean, in theory it should smell awesome. Who wouldn't love to have their home filled with the scent of orange and cloves? In practice it only smells nice for half an hour or so. After that point you have to literally pick the thing up and sniff it to get any scent. Boo.
Problem #2 is that once you pierce the skin of an orange, its clock starts ticking. Depending on the heat in your house and your ambient humidity, you may have a day, maybe two. Then it starts rotting. The combination of all the moisture in the orange's flesh plus all the sugar means that a studded orange will pretty much rot out before your eyes.
Thus, within three days the thing that you thought would be pretty and smell nice is neither of those things. It is a rotted pile of produce, a festering plate full of bacteria, mold, and larval fruit flies. And isn't it ironic the way that NOW you can smell the darned thing everywhere. Once that orange starts to go, you can smell the hyper-sweet odor of rotting fruit in every single corner of your domicile.
Martha Stewart can put a bow on it and make it all pretty, but Martha Stewart can afford to buy new oranges every day and pay a team of interns to stud them with cloves and dispose of the old ones. You and I are not so lucky.
Image courtesy Flickr/and Nancy says
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