The dilemma: Chucky version

My grandmother (who died of an inoperable brain tumor two Christmas's ago) was very crafty. Not like steal your man crafty. More like Mrs. macrame plant-hanger, sew your own clothes, paint your own figurines, two foot long wiener-dog made out of pantyhose you use to stop the drafts from leaking under the front door crafty. But her trademark craft project was her clowns, which she produced in such alarming excess that we (by 'we' I mean every human being she had ever met) received one for each special occasion of the year, and now and again just "because." Grandma was nothing if not thoughtful.

The clowns are a foam ball attached to a block of wood (head, body) which are then dressed in a little handmade jumpsuit and pointy hat, finished with stuffed felt boots and hands sewn on in the appropriate places. The block-of-wood body makes it so they "sit" nicely on a bookshelf or table, where they stare out of their creepy vacant google-eyes and plan to murder you in the night--universally agreed to be the number one nocturnal activity of scary clown dolls.

Which is sad. Because none of them start out brain sucking demons. Grandma's clowns--the idea alone, the pattern she created, et-cetera--aren't so awful of themselves, they could be adorable in some way, if not for the fact that my grandmother was horribly, cripplingly colorblind. Mix that with a garage-full of fabric remnants from the seventies...

Now you'd think that something that garish could turn the corner. The whole so very ugly and awful that it's kinda kitsch and fun phenomenon. No. Seriously. No.

So here's my problem. I've recently become reunited with a few boxes of Christmas decorations which had been rotting in my father's basement. At the bottom of one particularly mold-encrusted box lay a special, one-of-a-kind theme clown of Grandmas: A Christmas clown. No colorblind problem here...she stuck to the traditional red and green alright. It's covered with mold, not what you'd call washing machine safe, hideous (and potentially murderous)... and the very last thing my beloved Grandma made for me before she died.

Toss it? Or take the chance that either it, or the mold, will kill us all in the night? Wait, perhaps this will help you (help me) decide.