Mom's Owl Collection, Volume 12!

Mojo's Favorite Mother's Owl Collection, Volume 12

Smelly Candle and/or Potpourri Owls!

Mojo does not know or remember or particularly care if her Favorite Mother's Owl Collection was something her mother actually wanted to collect, or if it was intially or subsequently foisted upon her by a large family desperate for ideas for holiday gifts to give her. All she knows is, now her Favorite Mother no longer wants or needs or desires her Owl Collection. So Mojo's Favorite Mother cunningly foisted these things on her Forgotten Middle Daughter, in a pretense of supporting the Craptacular, but we all know the reality is, it saved her a trip to the dump. And now these things are cluttering Mojo's house instead of her own, heh heh heh. Now you see where Mojo gets her cunning, cleverly wrapped as it is in a verbose folly of ineptitude and greed. And you can also see, perhaps, that Mojo is no match for her senior when it comes to wheedling manipulation and distraction techniques while foisting crap upon a gullible subject.

This particular owl auction, being the penultimate owl auction, fills Mojo with just the tiniest twinge of regret. Not that she is sorry to see the owls go. No, Mojo is happiest when others are happy, and if buying owls on eBay makes one happy Mojo is happy being the instrument of happiness. No, Mojo is vaguely sad only because one of these owls in this group is an Early Childhood Memory. I will pause here to allow Craptacular readers everywhere to heave their collective groan of impatience before I continue. It's the biggest one of this group, the one on the left. He measures about five inches tall. Yes, officer, that's the culprit; I'm sure of it.

Mojo of course grew up in a simpler, more innocent time--at least that is her excuse when people discover just how ignorant she is about certain things--and one of her earliest memories involves Halloween. My Favorite Mother of course decorated for Halloween and prepared for the trick-or-treaters (for we had them back then in absolute droves; there was no such thing as a "Halloween party" put on by the school or the town; no, you were expected to roam the neighorhood knocking on stranger's doors and accepting food from them despite the urban legends about poisoned candy and whatnot) and one of the things she dragged out of her masses and masses of holiday decorations was the large owl candle, pictured here, as well as a similar cat candle. Similar in that it was colored similar to the owl, but it was long and thin and tall, not round and owly. Mom would light the cat candle and the owl candle and put them in the window.

I was maybe five or six when I first got a sense of tradition and began to fully appreciate the various holidays in life, and to my innocent childlike brain I imagined this owl in our window with the huge glowing eyes scaring the liver out of my costumed peers. When my mom brought it out and said she would light it and put it in the window along with our lit jack-o-lanterns I imagined it would look SO COOL. Maybe, I thought, it would be so scary they would be too afraid to even approach the HOUSE! And of course once it was lit it wasn't at all scary and the candle flame really was sort of flickery and didn't give off the piercing glow effect I wanted in a haunted owl. I guess what I am saying is, it was the first time in my life I was fully conscious of being disappointed when reality failed to meet my fevered imagination. Anyway, every year at Halloween Mom would bring out the owl and cat candle and I always remembered that first time when I watched my mom light them and I ran outside to see the effect in the window only to be crushed by banality. Because it wasn't scary or cool at all, but just what you see here--a pottery owl with a candle inside it. Ho-hum. He has the same face on both sides, if you care.

This group also has another, smaller owl that is a receptacle for tea lights, I think they call them? The little plaques in the short metal holders. Anyway, you light a tea light and stick it in his back, where there is a large hole. No rocket science there. And a third owl which seems to be not a candle, but perhaps a holder for stinky stuff, so it would be like an air freshener. That is my theory, anyway. At first I thought it might be one of those thingies that heats up the potpourri with a tea light, but I don't think so. I think it's just a holder. All three come with their Certificate of Craptacularity, suitable to catch wax drippings and eventually set afire and burn down your house if you are careless with candles. But you're not going to do that, are you? I hope not. And if you are, I assume you won't hold me legally responsible. Because Mojo warned you, didn't she. Oh, I guess I didn't. Be careful with these candles and don't burn your house down, 'kay? There. Now you can bid with impunity!