The touching reason one father paints his children’s ‘stuffies’ each year

As a Christmas gifts for his children, Latter-day Saint artist David Dibble paints portraits of their favorite stuffed animals.

David Dibble

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the November/December issue of LDS Living magazine.

Christmas as a child is a gift, and it’s fleeting. We have such a small window to experience it and a lifetime to look back on it with nostalgia.

As a painter, much of my work is about the journey of making memory tangible, and over the past few Christmas seasons I have sought a way to help my young children hold onto the magic of childhood and memories of Christmas.

As with many young people, my children are extremely passionate about their stuffed animals (“stuffies”). So for the past several Christmases I put the stuffies on my model stand and painted their portraits with the same honesty and dignity that I would any other model.

The children delighted in seeing something that felt so important and real to them given the respect of high art.

The finished painting.

Courtesy of David Dibble.

Each of my three children has a menagerie of stuffed toys, but I wanted to paint one that held special importance to them. Because of the high status of the toy, I couldn’t just spirit it away for a week to paint without significant consequences. Thus, my children had to be let in on the would’ve-been-secret gift. This led to sweet moments as they brought their special toy into the studio, placed it on the improvised model stand, and then sat to watch.

It quickly became clear that I was a guest in my child’s imaginative world, allowed a visitor pass as long as I behaved myself and kept to the rules. My daughter was particularly mindful of how the painting progressed.

She stood nearby, partly to make sure her stuffy was not out of her sight for too long and partly to offer correction: “This color is too dark, Dad,” she would say.

I carried on painting and smiled with satisfaction when, in the end, the dark background gave other colors context and my daughter knowingly proclaimed, “Yes, that’s just right.”

Paintings David gave his children of their stuffed animals.

David Dibble

One day my children will have their own homes, where I hope they’ll hang these paintings. I hope they’ll be a reminder of what Christmas felt like as a child, a reminder of a time when belief in things beyond themselves came so naturally.

And I hope that no matter how grown up my children are, they will remember their belief in the babe of Bethlehem, who I know brings what almost feels like magic not just to Christmas, but to life.