Please answer only if you smoke pot AND celebrate Christmas.
My dad, being one of the biggest [del]dealers[/del] independent pharmaceutical contractors in Menard County, has been known to give out dime bags of schwag to his buds (see what I did there?) at Christmas. And no, he’s never given me any. Apparently he believes in “boundaries” or something.
So to all you Christmas-celebrating tokers out there, have you ever given and/or received pot, or pot-related goods such as a bong or a clip, as a gift?
I don’t know if I should vote, because I don’t do drugs. But, when I was 18, my then-boyfriend asked for a pipe for Christmas. It came from a shady-looking shop. He said it was for tobacco. Yeah, um, right. Pretty sure it wasn’t.
I got a Celtic cross pot pipe from a co-worker once as a Christmas present. I honestly don’t think the co-worker (a very sweet 50-something church-lady) had a clue what it was. She was having a rough year (death in the family and divorce) and had mentioned how much Moms Mabley had made her laugh when she was a girl so I’d given her a Moms Mabley CD as a ‘no occasion’ gift a little while before and I have seldom if ever hit more of a bulls-eye with a gift, so I think she wanted to really give me something she thought I’d really like, and she knew that- at the time- I sometimes wore a Celtic cross necklace and that- at that time- I occasionally smoked a [tobacco] pipe, so it really was a sweet gift. NO IDEA where she got it, but some convenience stores have pipe racks so I’m guessing there.
Of course I may be deluding myself, she may have known exactly what it was- hard to mistake it for a tobacco pipe after all [would that much pipe tobacco even give you a drag I wonder?]. She may have thought “Young [at the time] agnostic gay white guy who likes THE BEATLES and other hippie music- probably a pot smoker”, who knows. In any case, while I have smoked it, I’ve never been a habitual user; the amount of pot I’ve smoked in more than 20 years since my first hit all added together would probably equal about two weeks of usage in the life of a daily smoker, so I re-gifted it to somebody I thought would better appreciate it. She loved it.
A decade or so later when my mother was terminally ill with lung cancer and going through chemo she asked me, very confidentially, if I could score her some because she’d heard it helped with nausea. I was a bit offended- I hadn’t smoked any in many years and asked her “why do you think I would be able to get you some?” and she said “Well in the first place when has legality ever been an issue for either of us where the other one needing something was concerned? And I know you don’t smoke pot but I figured you’d likely know somebody who did…”. My mind was split- half of it being righteously indignant and the other half preparing the spreadsheet of the five to ten best names, phone numbers, reliability, and trustworthiness of people I knew damned good and well could get me some quality pot. I had the order placed within five minutes of hanging up on the phone with her and picked up the eighth of an ounce and a borrowed pipe within a couple of hours.
That was on a Monday I believe. I was supposed to see my mother that weekend, but as fate would have it she was taken to the hospital that Wednesday and by the time I got to the hospital she was in-and-out-of-consciousness and had a ventilator in her throat so it didn’t seem an ideal time to light one up and pass it around, and she never got out of the hospital- she died a few days later. To this day my siblings don’t know that there was a baggie under my seat at the time.
So, having an 8th of an ounce (thereabouts- WAY more expensive than the last time I’d paid for it, incidentally) and knowing that my mother’s death was going to be traumatic for me and not wanting to turn to chemicals because my family has a centuries long tradition of alcoholism and other substance abuse. (My mother was quite accomplished “bout the raising of a wrist”, my father was a full fledged [but fully functional] alcoholic, my grandfather grew his own marijuana, two of my great-grandmothers [both born during Reconstruction] were morphine addicts and my great-grandfather- a small town doctor- used and prescribed cocaine like it was sugar pills.) So, I gave it to my two pothead cousins who were pallbearers, telling them- even though this was August- ‘Merry Christmas’. One told me later that it was especially primo (I called the ‘most ladylike’ smoker I knew and asked for ‘salon quality’) but I declined to assist.
Schwag?! Jesus H. Wesley tapdancin’ Christ. I mean, it would be ludicrous to expect some Humboldt County or Matanuska Thunderfuck for free on the holidays, but schwag? Surely he could do a little better than that.