The Diehard Tryhards take on the Christmas Challenge

By Staff Writers Hannah Chou, Katherine Guo, Amber Lee & Anagha Mandayam

As the holidays approach, decorations begin to appear and gifts pop up under the tree. In celebration of the festivities, the Diehard Tryhards held a tournament of classic Christmas customs: crafting ornaments, decorating trees, and wrapping gifts, to see who was worthy of the title Christmas Challenge Champion.

Background

Amber
For me, Christmas isn’t just the most wonderful time of the year; it’s also the most artsy time of the year. As a 6-year-old, I enjoyed making holiday decorations to hang around my house and looking through rolls of pretty wrapping paper at the store. Now, even though I’ve physically grown up, my childhood mentality has not, so I still love to deck the halls with cheesy Christmas arts-and-crafts. After all, one can never have too much holiday spirit.

Katherine
Although I am a Diehard fan of winter and all things Christmas (Hello Starbucks red cups!), this will be my first time in forever, wrapping gifts and decorating trees. I’ve had absolutely terrible experiences with gift-wrapping and tree decorating. That’s probably because I ended up wasting a whole roll of paper on one measly little box and shattered multiple glass ornaments a few years ago. Nevertheless, I approach this challenge with a determined mind. Paper cuts never bothered me anyways.

Anagha
The holiday season excites me! I love exchanging gifts, picking out a tree, and seeing my neighbor continue their annual tradition of putting up their “Go Bowling!” sign. That being said, wrapping presents and decorating trees have always been an issue. My mom is my Christmas angel when it comes to putting a festive touch on things. This challenge doesn’t scare me, and hopefully I can use a couple of tricks from her book to be the shining star on the tree!

Hannah
Christmas has always been my favorite holiday of the year. Ever since I was little, I enjoyed helping my parents set up Christmas decorations. However, I am completely incompetent at gift-wrapping because the selfish brat that I was as a kid believed that presents should only be given to me, and the thought of giving presents to someone else was utterly insane. Despite the obstacle, I have no fear that I will emerge as the top competitor. My unwavering holiday spirit will surely be the key to my success.

Thoughts Before

Amber
As a self-proclaimed artist, I want to say that I have an advantage in making ornaments. However, over-perfectionism is an occupational hazard of being an artist, so I’m not so sure I can whip up homemade ornaments, wrap presents, and decorate a tree under a time crunch without stopping to make sure everything is absolutely perfect. Hopefully, I will be able to pull myself together and snatch first place instead of going into panic mode when the timer starts.

Katherine
As a debater, competition comes naturally and I am sure I will absolutely sweep the competition when it comes to efficiency. The timer is a very old friend, so no worries there! Despite years of music and dance lessons, I’m still quite clumsy, so I’m much less enthusiastic about decorating the ornaments and the tree, as I have been known to accidently knock things over. Hopefully, I will prevail with enough peace of mind to grab first place!

Anagha
My Christmas ornaments have slowly evolved from macaroni sloppily glued on paper to ornate ones bought from Michaels. It’s safe to say that my sheer laziness has taken over and I’ve lost touch with my artistic skills. I’ll admit I’m a bit worried about the first task, but on the other hand, I’m confident I can easily take out the other competitors in the tree decorating contest. With the little tricks from my mom’s handy holiday book, the “tree” of them have got nothing on me!

Hannah
Over the years, I managed to put my selfish little self behind me, and now I have developed into a kinder person; I am absolutely certain that Santa put me on his “nice” list this year. However, when it comes to competition, I mean business. Using my enthusiastic but rather inadequate skills in gift wrapping, ornament painting, and Christmas tree decorating, I am sure that I will emerge on the top.

DIY Ornaments

Amber
It looks like I’ll have to take back my snooty comment about having an advantage as an artist. However, I was correct that over-perfectionism would be my downfall. Evidently, my arts-and-crafts skills have rusted over time, and this fact, combined with my extreme need to fine-tune all the details, slowed me down. In the end, I only finished a few ornaments. But I am proud that I didn’t resort to taking the easy way out by just covering everything with glitter, unlike some of my competitors.

Katherine
I can surely state that I have never been covered in as much glitter as I was during the DIY ornament event. My hopes of claiming first place slowly melted with each drop of gravity-defying glitter glue, and my clumsiness was no help. Out of the four bottles of glitter glue used, only one ended up on the ornaments, resulting in haphazard decorations. The aftermath was what I imagine a war between glitter and paper would look like.

Anagha
The phrase “you can never have too much glitter” is 100 percent false. It seemed as though the glitter ended up more in my hair, nails, and eyes instead of my ornaments. By the end of this challenge, I knew that I absolutely hated anything sparkly, which is probably why I didn’t like my final products. As I had originally predicted, my ornaments were just like the sloppy ones I used to make in kindergarten, if not worse!

Hannah
I recently read a book called Things Fall Apart in my English class, and I can confidently say that the title accurately describes my DIY ornaments. My dreams of creating the most extravagant ornaments were shattered before my eyes as I struggled to make my crafts presentable, and any plans of making them more aesthetically pleasing quickly went down the drain. Not only did I make a huge mess around me, but I also failed to meet my expectations. Santa would have been disappointed.

Gift Wrapping

Amber
I had assumed that my superficial knowledge of origami and paper-folding techniques would carry me through this task. I was sadly mistaken, as I got a huge toy robot with three oddly-arranged wheels at the bottom to wrap in a few minutes. Needless to say, the panic monster took over at this point. All I know is that I sliced away with the scissors like a maniac, crumpled a lot of paper, and used copious amounts of tape. The result was a very lumpy and wrinkled package.

Katherine
I was given a small blessing in the gift-wrapping division, as I received a mannequin, which I was able to manipulate into a roughly rectangular position. The necessary miracle still thwarted me, as I grossly overestimated the needed paper, resulting in a patchy tape job. Despite that, my year in ninth grade geometry came in handy and I was able to quickly wrap the mannequin and tie a bow as a finishing touch.

Anagha
I thought I had this challenge in the bag since all my mom’s little tricks would come in handy. But I was not prepared to wrap a globe as my present! In the four minutes I had to make this gift look presentable, I scrambled to cut out a sizeable amount of wrapping paper, which I thought was enough. It turned out I had completely underestimated the amount I needed and my wrapping job left open areas.  It had come down to the last minute and I started to frantically tape the wrapping paper together and decided to tie a bow at the end to cover up my haphazard wrapping. It’s safe to say that this challenge was a disaster as well.

Hannah
Don’t get me started with gift-wrapping! Just figuring out how to operate wrapping paper was challenging enough, and wrapping under a time pressure proved to be an absolute failure. I thought I had it easy in this particular event since I was blessed be assigned the easiest object, a Nerf Gun, to wrap. However, the gift wrapping event taught me just how much I took wrapped gifts for granted as I could not finish wrapping it in the given time frame. Just how do people do it?

Christmas Tree Decorating

Amber
My early holiday memories are scarred with experiences of the Christmas tree toppling on me as I decorated it, sending ornaments shattering and leaving a sizable lump on my head—and that was with a 2-foot-tall plastic tree. So naturally, I was apprehensive when I had to decorate a 7-foot-tall tree for part of the challenge. Somehow, I managed to complete the task, ornaments, string lights, and all, without knocking over the tree and getting flattened underneath.

Katherine
At long last, I had an advantage in the Christmas tree decorating department: my relatively tall height!  Or at least, so I thought. I was no match for the 7-foot tree, so the top of the tree remained woefully untouched. Nevertheless, I was able to arrange my ornaments and Christmas lights throughout the rest of the tree. I wish I could say my tree was a miniature version of the iconic Macy’s tree, but that definitely wasn’t the case. All in all, I can safely say that the tree was brighter than my future in DIY crafts.

Anagha
My frustration with glitter from the previous challenge really affected my time management and at the end of the ornament challenge, I had a whopping total of three ornaments for decorating my tree. And to make matters worse, Hannah dropped one of my ornaments! Never give her anything to hold people; she’s the clumsiest person out there. Katherine came to my rescue and lent me one of her ornaments, and with the use of string and streamers, I was able to still put together a festive Christmas tree!

Hannah
The only event that I had slightly more confidence in was Christmas tree decorating. I was able to show off my lassoing skills to get the end of the Christmas lights to the top of the tree. Despite the tree being 7 feet tall, my experience as a short person for almost all my life assisted me in finding different ways to reach the upper levels of the tree. Although my tree was slightly lacking in Christmas lights, I think I have a chance of being on par with my competitors.

Thoughts After

Amber
Considering that I winged the whole competition, banking on my unsharpened holiday survival skills to back me up, I’m surprised things didn’t turn out worse. Making the DIY ornaments was by far the most stressful, but I’m sure I did decently in tree decoration (if the criteria for decent is not electrocuting myself with the string lights). Regardless of how the final rankings lined up, I gave this Christmas challenge my best effort and shared many laughs with the other competitors.

Katherine
Once again, I let my pride get the better of me and overreached my artistic abilities, little as they are. At the beginning, I was confident that I would be able to handle the stress and nerves, but my shaking hands thwarted my attempts to surge to the top. As the competition progressed, my chances of winning plummeted in my eyes. Despite my overall lack of proficiency, my spirit was spurred by the teamwork and sportsmanship we all shared. After all, it’s the spirit that counts!

Anagha
Sadly, my mom’s book of little techniques and my Christmas spirit wasn’t enough to save me as I had originally thought. The time crunch and my inexperience got the best of me and I began to realize coming in first place wasn’t within my reach any longer. But in the end, having fun is what counts. We had a merry time competing and helping each other out (even if that meant dropping an ornament or two along the way).

Hannah
Overall, I think I may have overestimated my holiday-crafting abilities. Before the competition, I was absolutely certain that I would leave my opponents in the dust with my creativity fueled by my Christmas spirit. However, these challenges quickly made me face reality, and my hopes of earning the title of “Christmas Challenge Champion” were crushed. Nevertheless, I had a jolly time participating in these festive activities, and I am not upset about my ranking. After all, Christmas is a time for joy and cheer!

 

Photo by Feature Editor Brian Tseng