Magenta

A color crayoning dynasty.

Although hard to say out loud, no other words came to mind when I found out recently that my son had followed in his older sister’s footsteps by winning his division of the Effingham Fire Department’s annual coloring contest.

“Dad, guess what?” he asked me a few weeks ago after school.

“He won the coloring contest!” his sister interrupted.

“No he didn’t.”

“Yes, he did.

“Yes I did!”

“You did?”
            “He won the contest!”

“That’s unbelievable!”

Now, as a seasoned father, I should have known better than to say such a veiled insult out loud. Besides that, it’s really not unbelievable that he won. Most grade schoolers color like children, and because he has inherited his mother’s inspiring attention to detail, coloring inside the lines is kind of his thing.

It was surprising to me, however, that he won exactly twelve months after his sister, who is also a good color crayoner, but who is also his sibling. (I just assumed there was a familial term limit kind of policy.) However, art is art, and so, here we are, trudging through an actual column about a grade school coloring contest.

Granted, one might point out that there are too many real things happening in the world—the mid-term elections, political discord, vaping—to discuss simple color crayoning.  Others will smirk, perhaps even scoff. “Yeah, right. Who’s coloring what? One family wins two years in a row? Put down the magenta, dad, and go mow the lawn.”

Nonsense. I do not color. In fact, I’m so busy I don’t even have time to write a column about the mid-term elections.

More importantly, however, color crayoning in our home has never been just about coloring. Crayoning is life, and if you want your grade school kid to have a chance at this kind of glory, then consider a few of these uncertified life-coaching tips.

First off, children need to live in a color-crayon rich environment. In other words, your house must be full of colors. This means you should own multiple boxes of crayons and even more Ziploc bags full of crayons. You should also have at least three or four unopened boxes of crayons for no real good reason.

 If you’re serious about this, and you should be, I would also recommend having crayons in your couch cushions and beneath your couch. You should have crayons on the floor and in the car, buried in the car seat and melted into the door. If you want to win a coloring contest, at no point in your child’s day should they be more than three feet from color crayons.

Secondly, everything your child creates with those crayons is art, from the moment they dawdle up the table to well into adolescence. Save it all. Put their papers into folders and put those folders into boxes. Date them. Hang them on the refrigerator. Hang them on the freezer. Hang them from the washing machine. Anything that is remotely magnetic should have a picture on it, drawn by your children, dated and digitally archived.

Finally, and I cannot emphasize this enough, fill your house with huge amounts of random objects, like seven dozen plastic Easter eggs. It’s important that young artists have numerous tactile objects for them to draw and for parents to trip over, and then for them to draw a picture of their parents tripping over.  Unless your house looks like Santa Claus crashed into it and no one called the cops, your kid is not winning this contest.

 In closing, although this year’s winners have already been selected, as they say in Chicago and, as of late, St. Louis, “there’s always next year.” Until 2021, that is, when their kid sister struts into South Side with a backpack full of wax.