Tell us about the gifts that people liked the most. Or the ones you liked the most. Heck there are no rules, just share some fun stories.
Years ago when Dad was still alive I took a big risk and got Mom and Dad a video game console for Christmas. I have no idea what made me think that they would want one. After I bought it (This was more than 10 years ago and 129 dollars was tough for me to scrape up) I agonized over it for weeks and weeks (I buy presents early, it was actually months.) Would they like it? Would they use it?
It was one of the best presents that I could have gotten them. They became hooked on Ms. PacMan. They played for hours each night. They would say “Let’s just play one quick one” and then play until way past their bed time. Mom said she would catch Dad getting up in the middle of the night to practice so that he could beat her the next night. They told me that for the first year the ONLY day that they didn’t play was when Dad had pneumonia. And he got up to play the day after.
Mom still talks fondly about that game and the amount of time that they spent together laughing and giggling together over it. I have no idea what made me think to buy it, but it remains one of the gifts I’m glad I bought.
I came up with the idea to buy my mom a replica of her favorite Auguste Rodin sculpture, The Danaid. It’s a beautiful piece, and when I saw a table-top version at The Museum Company Store for a mere $120, I suggested that my brothers and I pitch in and buy it for her. I was a poor high schoool student, and my brothers had much better jobs and much more money that I did. Well, J wasn’t interested, so M and I put our cash together and bought it. (I paid for $80 of it, which was a boat load for me to spend on one gift back then.)
She almost cried when she saw it.
For our first married Christmas, my husband got an Xbox. It was the first year they came out, and he was salivating for one for months. I kept telling him to keep dreaming, since they were $300 and there was no way he was getting one. Well, I contacted everyone who would have bought him a gift, and got them all to go in on it with me. I bought him a game and a second controller as well.
I gave my ex-sister-in-law a combination music box/calidescope, a nice one, made of brass & walnut similar to this one, and had a silver plaque affixed to it reading:
1.) I’ve recently told the story on this Board about the present I gave Pepper Mill when she was in the hospital. Pepper hates the Precious Moments figures with a passion – those simpering, teardrop-eyed little angel children are just too damned cute to stomach. So when she was recuperating I thought I’d cheer her up with a couple of boxes. She opened the first one to find — a Precious Moments figurine! In all it’s awful glory. She knew that I knew she hated these, so after a moment of her puzzled reaction I gave her the other box, which contained
…a hammer
2.) My father loved to pop the bubble wrap, so one year for Christmas we gave him a box filled with bubble wrap, and nothing else.
3.) Another Christmas we gave him a golden toothpick – they really do exist, and we thought it’d be classier than using the tines of his fork.
4.) During the height of the “Cabbage Patch Dolls” fad, my mother drew a face on a head of cabbage, wrote up a birth certificate for “Hedda Cabbage”, wrapped it up, and gave it to my sister for Christmas.
5.) My boss took a sabbatical to take part in an expedition to Antarctica. We gave him a copy of the VHS tape of John Carpenter’s The Thing to watch over and over.
For a while I was living in Philadelphia and my brother was in Washington DC. We were both going home to Buffalo for Christmas. He asked me to come to DC in my pick-up to get Dad’s present because it wouldn’t fit in his car.
My brother got a lawn ornament, it was a plywood profile of a sheep* with fake fur glued on. The thing was two feet tall and about a foot across. He wrapped it in layer after layer after layer of newspaper. By the time he was done it could barely squeeze through a door. It was huge. We have pictures of Dad unwrapping and unwrapping and unwrapping, the pile of paper was bigger than the coffee table.
Well done a huge hit. That started the wrapping paper wars with me and brother dear.
Duct tape is one thing, hundreds of little pieces of duct tape where you can’t unravel it in a string is better. I’ve used yellow ‘caution asbestos do not enter’ tape. A box in a box in a box, garbage bags and even nailed a crate together.
He did one that left me speechless and I never tried again. In the cardiac catheterization clinic he runs they do the procedures and run an x-ray camera that records on film. He took a few hundred feet of this funky lavender colored film and painstakingly wrapped a box for me. It had a giant bow made from the film too. It was almost too pretty to tear apart.
For my broke college aged niece I took a band aid box and filled it with lead just for the WTF? Look on her face before she unwrapped it. It also had cash.
My sister in laws loves scented Yankee candles. Of the hundreds of different sizes and flavors they come in, two of us managed to buy the same size and scent for he one year. Nobody believes it was a coincidence.
I grew up about 5 hrs drive from my grandparents. It was actually my grandfather and his second wife, so they had 2 households worth of stuff, plus all lot of stuff from a closed medical practice, when grandpa retired. There was nothing they needed. (Heck, it’s hard to get out of the house without Grandma talking you into taking something with you.)
Anyway, one year, Mom and Dad cooked up a turkey dinner, with all the fixings, packed up plates, silverware, glasses, placemats, napkins, food and family. Everything but the diningroom table. We drove the 4 hours, and showed up on the doorset, with dinner. My grandparents were delighted. Heck, the small town newspaper even wrote about it.
One year when the missus and I were very short on cash, we decided to spend what money we did have on getting the kids presents and not exchange gifts between us. What she did not know was that I had been squirreling away bits of cash throughout the year. It wasn’t all that much, just the result of saving 2-3 dollars a week. I went to a pawn shop and found a ring with 5 smallish diamonds set in a row. The setting was pretty amateurish - the diamonds did not line up exactly - but you had to look pretty close to tell. I used this to haggle the owner down to a price I could afford. I even had enough left to buy a card (new, not used). On Christmas morning the kids had a blast. The last thing we “open” is our stockings. Imagine her surprise when she dumped out hers and among the fruits and candies was a diamond ring! When you’re expecting nothing a diamond ring, even an imperfect one, is quite a shock. Yes, she cried. And she still wears that ring every day.
The first birthday Ivylad and I were dating I got him a new briefcase. Inside the briefcase was a clipboard with a calculator built into the hinge. (He really wanted one and it was a bear to find.)
I also rented a Chrysler Le Baron convertible for him for the weekend. He was most thrilled.
When I was in high school, a group of friends and I gave each other T-shirts with action figures of ourselves on them. I don’t actually remember the specifics, but each one had comic book style art that was by one of the artistic people and different quotes and aspects of them that we appreciated (and that made for good “Kung-fu grip”-esque attributes) about them. I ended up making the shirts for most of them (not my own), and everyone pitched in for each others’ shirts.
I’m enjoying these stories, and I hope I have one to add after this Christmas. I’ve spent a lot of thought (and not much money) on Stonebow’s gift this year. I hope it goes over as well as I think it will.
When I got into Harry Potter, I gave my kid cousin an “Owl Mail” kit for Christmas. I bought fancy parchment-like printer paper, and using one of the HP fonts and a stationery program, printed up a lot of self-mailers. I also put in seals to close the mailers, glittery gel pens (I tried hard to fix a ballpoint pen refill inside a quill, but it just didn’t work), and chocolate coins–to pay the owls. Then I put it all in a gold stationery box and affixed a label from Flourish and Blotts, Diagon Alley, London.
This year for his birthday I got my husband a box set of DVD’s on the Saturn 5 rocket program. He’s a major air and space fan and the Saturn 5 is his favorite rocket. He loved it and shared it with his father, who was an engineer in the space program. It wound up giving them all new stuff to talk about and connect on. (And it turns out one of our nephews is also a space fan, so we may have yet another generation to share it with.)
The Christmas before my Dad died was a memorable one.
A month or so before I went up to see him I called him to see how he was handling his chemo. The talk got into him never being able to come back to Los Angeles.
“You know the one thing I’ll miss about never seeing LA again? Smoke House garlic bread,” he told me.
For the uninitiated, there’s a restaurant down by the studios in Burbank/Hollywood called The Smoke House. Totally old school class, dark wood paneling, dark red leather booths, the best steak dinners available anywhere, and the finest garlic bread in the world.
I called the Smoke House to see if I could get the recipe, and was turned down. I asked for the manager, told her the story, and she told me that while she couldn’t give out recipes, what she could do was wrap unbaked garlic bread up for me and pack it in dry ice for the trip.
I picked up 5 loaves on the 24th and drove up to see Dad. I arrived in the evening and told Dad I’d brought him a very special present this year.
I ran out to the car and grabbed a loaf of bread and brought it to him. He looked quizically at me and unwrapped the loaf. He sniffed and looked up at me with a big smile on his face. “Smoke House?” I nodded and he called my mom in to ask her to bake it for him right then and there. We had garlic bread for dinner that night.
Dad died 2 1/2 weeks later. I believe that was one of the best gifts I could have given him.
I’m a real bastard at giving gifts along the same lines as the Goob clan.
Examples:
Two of my friends were going out. Their birthdays are a week apart. The girl is very assertive, and tended to drag the guy around a lot. He took it in general good humor but very much complaining. I wound up giving her a leash and a tiny padlock. I gave him a locking collar. It was a very nice collar, actually. He put it on for about five seconds and took it off before she could lock it closed.
Another year I gave this same friend the collector’s edition of Life, because he was complaining that he didn’t have one (our workload for school that year was brutal). He gave me a Clue when my turn came around.
The year after that I gave him a coffee mug that said “I am Halfling! Hear me roar!”. He’s the shortest guy in the group.
This group of friends has a tradition of impossible wrappings - entire rolls of duct tape go into these things. We weave them into fabric, even. I remember using tongs to seal one in wax, so there was nothing to get a grip on - the wax had to be broken off in tiny little fragments. One member of the group is infamous for being… well, high-mediocre. He gets second place in everything he works at (losing to different people, but still). We got him the Mediocrity poster from Despair, Inc. We wrapped it by just sticking crosses of duct tape over the ends of the packing tube it came in.
A different friend fell off a roof once. I gave him a miniature anvil as a get-well present.
