New Brunswick — Children all over the Picture Province are crafting what they’ve been told is the “perfect Father’s Day gift” by their teachers this week. Upon investigation, though, The Manatee has discovered that the craft in question is the same piece-of-crap tie made from cheap-ass construction paper that kids were making for their dads 30 years ago.
“I’ve used the same craft in all my 36 years of teaching,” confessed Pauline Harrows of Saint John. “We’re so close to the end of the year, it’s so nice out, and we’ve used up our yearly spending budget by now — we just need something cheap, easy and that will keep the kids occupied for half a day before the afternoon movie.”
Harrows said it’s not just the older teachers who give the lacklustre effort for their Father’s Day craft and insists that the newer, younger teachers feel the same.
“It doesn’t matter what age you are,” she assured. “Whether you listen to The Beatles or Bieber — this time of the year, we just don’t care.”
Our reporter questioned a younger teacher at the same school to corroborate Harrow’s assertions.
“OMG… it is totally true!” admitted Grade 1 teacher Charlee Young. “It’s not really our fault, though. The kids are miserable this time of year and they don’t really want to do a craft. Dads don’t really care. There’s a lot going on around the school — it’s complicated.”
Young added that not all holiday crafts are as pathetic as the cutout tie given to fathers on their special day.
“We went all out on Mother’s Day, for instance. My class literally made our own high-heeled shoes out of leather that we crafted with our own bare hands, we decorated the shoe with gemstones the children chiselled out of nearby caverns, we filled the shoes with organic soil from our very own garden and finally we planted an extremely rare orchid in the shoe and nurtured it for three months so it would properly bloom in time for mom.
“But dads? We just use our leftover scrap paper, cut it into a triangle and expect the fathers to look like idiots when they wear it to work the next day.”
Our reporter asked local dad Henry Montel, who has a child in Young’s class, what he planned on doing with his tie come Father’s Day.
“I’ll either leave it on my dresser for a couple of months until I can safely throw it in the trash,” he suggested, “or if it’s really terrible, which it probably will be, I’ll tell my kid that I’m taking it to hang in my office and I’ll chuck it when I walk into work. Hopefully it’s better than the construction paper stocking I got for Christmas.”