Cotton Candy Ornament

The Cotton Candy Ornament sits at the loud end of our candy ornaments, a cone of spun pink and white glass gathered onto a paper-look stick rendered in the same blown form. The pink is the hard part. It has to look like air that has been talked into holding a shape, which means the color runs thinnest at the outer edge and builds toward the core, and getting that gradient backward makes the whole piece read as insulation foam. It is three and a half inches tall and light enough for a branch tip. My cousin Winifred maintains that cotton candy tastes of nothing whatsoever and buys one at every fair she attends, which is most of them, and eats about a third. The Royal Ontario Museum puts serious money into keeping things that were never built to last a season, a job that sounds absurd said out loud and entirely obvious the moment you consider the alternative.