Ten Years of Cheshire Cat

Happy Halloween! I carved a pumpkin into a Cheshire Cat.

The Cheshire Cat is one of my favorite cartoon characters. I love his crazy, random, confident, and fearless personality, and I love his absurdly colorful design. He’s my go-to when I need an avatar or art project idea. As I reflect back, I realized that this obsession has been a journey of doing arts and crafts with my kids. Specifically, my attachment to this funky character is directly linked to me growing up with Xuan.

2014: Hello Cheshire Kitty

A decade ago, Xuan Xuan was still a 1-year-old infant-toddler with limited entertainment options. Thanks to gender stereotyping, she had a ton of Hello Kitty merch, including a large coloring book. She was barely capable of scribbling at that point, so our interactions with her mainly consisted of us coloring the book for her.

Hong being a good artist was great at making a full page of beautiful colors, complete with smooth gradients. I had neither the skill nor the patience to fill out a full page of Hello Kitty pictures, so I opted for a different route…

For the most part, I tried to answer the question “what other cat can this cat turn into?” And that was the first time I ever realized that anything can be Cheshire Cat.

2016: Painted Cheshire Pumpkin

A few years later, Xuan was a solid toddler capable of pre- pre-school level of art projects, mostly involving large paint strokes and gluing big chunk of stuff together. That fall, we did a sort of Halloween-Thanksgiving hybrid project of painting baby pumpkins and sticking sequins on them. I didn’t love the lack of intellectual involvement in this project, and thus upgraded my pumpkin a bit:

Cheshire Cat and gold fish staring at each other:

2018: Maneki-Cheshire-Neko

On Christmas Eve 2018, Xuan began her first winter break as a kindergarten student. Hong had to work and Ting was still in daycare, so I got a full day of 1-on-1 time with my first born. I took her to a pottery painting shop to kill a few hours. She picked a donut to paint, and I was proud of my daughter for choosing food over everything else. As for me, I spotted a cat. It was a maneki-neko, the Japanese lucky-money cat that you see in front of all sort of Asian businesses, but that detail didn’t really matter. If it was a cat, it could be a Cheshire. And that’s what I did.

2021: Diamond Cheshire Cat

After the pandemic struck, the world became a very different place. Kids were expected to spend a lot more time at home alone with various craft kits. Among the things we tried, our daughters were quite fond of diamond paintings. Ting was still quite young and not patient enough to do much, but Xuan managed several nice pictures that remain on display to this day.

When winter break came, I thought they needed a project to past time. A larger, more complex diamond painting was agreed upon as a good idea, and they fully embraced the Cheshire Cat design that I found and suggested. It ended in total failure because they gave up after doing just a small corner. I picked up the slack, one of the many times my attempt to keep them occupied backfired to become more work for myself.

2023: Carved Cheshire Pumpkin

Now that we’re in 2023, my baby girl has grown into a pre-teen’s body with a young adult’s mind. We decided that she was now old enough to handle sharp tools and therefore partake in the American tradition of pumpkin carving.

Xuan was on her 3rd read through of this massive 1-million-word novel series called Harry Potter. Her passion for the story led our entire family to dress up as Hogwarts students this year. Naturally, her very first pumpkin design had to be on theme, too.