Going for Baroque
...plus a very-Martha Book
The year was 1988. The mission, if you chose to accept it, was to produce a very Martha Christmas and a very Martha book. In its pages, we would see Martha building wreaths, Martha baking cookies, Martha baking cakes and pies, Martha canning jams, Martha gilding pomegranates, Martha baking hams, Martha whipping up a croquembouche and a vat of cassoulet for a festive Christmas brunch.
Not to mention, Martha constructing Baroque gingerbread mansions, followed by a Baroque gingerbread cathedrals, plus Martha painting her own wrapping paper amid pine boughs flecked with gold, while making ornaments for trees (plural).
And so it came to pass. When published a year later, (in 1989) Martha Stewart’s Christmas sold 300,000 hardcover copies, became Martha’s eighth bestselling book. One reviewer in The Boston Globe, wrote, “What can you say about a woman who makes not a gingerbread house but a gingerbread mansion?” For that matter, what can you say about a woman who embroiders Christmas bags for her donkeys — Rufus, Clive, and Billie — and fills them to the brim with their favorite foods.
Well, you can say many things. In fact, some people said very nice things while others pointed out that women spent more and more time working outside the home, and had less and less time to build — say, Baroque cathedrals from gingerbread. Still others — especially those, like myself, who freelanced for Martha — might have noted that Christmas was Martha’s job, or rather, one of countless jobs she managed while building and rebuilding her billion-dollar brand.
Fyi, Martha was born in 1941, just on the far side of the Depression, to parents who couldn’t afford to feed their family. They set their six children to work tending the garden and beat them when they made mistakes. Her father was an alcoholic whom Martha says was “mean, mean, mean.” In 2000, Joan Didion portrayed Martha in The New Yorker as a woman who, “sits at the table with men and walks away with the chips.”
Thank you, but not entirely true. You could likely learn at least this much if you could read a few hundred pages elsewhere and synthesize it Period
I loved your poker metaphor at the end! Now your happy readers know more about Martha Stewart than reams of all the articles about her ever mentioned.