So that we have a complete set of threads, here it is, the thread for sharing the lovely and heartwarming story of The Best Present I Ever Received.
I have two …
… my daughter, born Dec. 27, 1994. I always tell her she’s my best Christmas present, ever!
… and my engagement ring I received from my husband, the true love of my life. We’ll celebrate our fourth anniversary in March!
You?
Daughter was the best. Incomparable, really.
A pop gun when I was 7 was pretty keen though.
My best one might be coming this year. Or it might turn out to be a totally awkward situation. Time will tell.
Over the past few years I’ve gotten some neat kitchen devices. I think my favorite was the ice cream maker. I was supposed to fly to Florida on the 23rd, and I ended up getting deathly sick. My GF had to bring me the phone so I could call my parents and give them the bad news. I couldn’t even get out of bed, I was that sick. No way I could deal with the airport experience.
On the 25th, there was a huge snowstorm, so GF couldn’t make it to see her family. We ended spending the day together. She could make it to the store, though, so I had her pick up some ingredients for me. We ended up making pink peppermint ice cream. It was awesome!
Ellen, my son’s due date was your daughter’s birthday. He was born 11 long days later. My favorite present was Sirius Satellite Radio. Ever since then, I’ve had Howard Stern available at all times.
When I was fourteen, I got contact lenses, which I’d wanted for years. I was still an awkward, hideous little goob, but being able to ditch my glasses was like glimpsing the light at the end of the tunnel.
A Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.
Legos. Getting a lego set and putting it together over the holiday break with my dad are some of my best memories growing up.
I don’t know if this THE BEST, but it was the first one that popped into my mind.
My birthday is Sept 3, so it is right at the end of summer and beginning of the school year. Because my only steady work has been school related for past six years (work study and then TAing), money is always really, really tight on my birthday. It’s the worse part of the year for us, but it’s my own fault b/c I didn’t want to work in the summer (well, I worked, but not for steady income) so I never complained about it
On my 22nd birthday, my husband announced he wanted to go to Pasadena. So I drove to Pasadena (some 40 miles from where we lived at the time), and he took me to a beautiful little park and told me to sit down at the table. He unpacked sandwiches, a hostess cupcake, a single candle, and my small, portable cd player.
The gift was in the cd player. It was Wilco’s A Ghost is Born. I heard the album online (Wilco had it streaming for their website) but just enough to get hooked. And I always say “Oh, I need to buy such and such album” but it always seems like such an extravagance that I just make do with the albums I already own. I didn’t even ask him for it, but he knew how much I loved it (and Wilco).
It is still my favorite album, and of all my birthdays, it’s the only one I remember vividly.
I can’t remember which Christmas it was, but my fiance got me a “cat voucher”. I’d been wanting a cat for awhile, and so he made a card and glued pictures of cats from the internet.
Our printer was almost out of ink and he used a blue card, so all the cats were tinged blue. He’d stuck pictures of the breeds I was most interested in (Devon Rex, Singapura) with little question marks around them.
I cut off the text at the bottom a little. It reads “Persians are evil-looking and give you hay fever”. The cat at the top was his family’s very friendly Siamese, whom I coveted.
I saw Monsters Inc with my now husband and I don’t know what it is about that movie but it completely resonated with me–I looked like Boo when I was a little girl so her adventures and how she overcame her fear just really hooked me in. I cry every time I see the end of that movie, and I’m most definitely not a crier.
Well the year we’d watched the movie together, my husband looked all over the place for a Boo doll but could not find one (he found out later they’d been recalled because of her pigtail decoration, apparently it was a choking hazard). So that year he got me the movie (my first ever DVD of my own).
The NEXT year right before Christmas, he spied a single Boo doll sitting forlornly in the stuffed movie doll bin at Blockbuster, so he snatched her up as a gift for me.
Again, normally I am not a mush melon in the least. But that Boo doll made me tear up. Best.gift.EVAH.
An ankh ring given to me by my mother that’s my favorite possession(long story here) would be tops.
A Dr. Zaius action figure given to me by my ex-boyfriend/current closest friend the same year I gave him a bootleg of Transformers (the animated movie), both of them inspired by a talk we had once about toys and shows we loved as kids (neither of us knew the other was getting a gift based on that conversation).
A small trunk (or casket in the literal sense) handpainted with designs from the Book of Kells by my cousin.
A set of ugly brass vases that meant a lot because it was given to me by a penniless deranged old man who was a client when I was a social worker- he wanted to get me something and he found them while dumpster diving and polished them up.
When I was in Germany my host mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Being boy-crazy I told her I wanted a blond boy. Come Christmas day, we go over to my host-grandparent’s house and after dinner comes time to open gifts. Ceremoniously, they brought in a life-sized stuffed doll named Arnold Niederegger and sit him down next to me, and put his arm around me. He had long blond hair. Everyone in the family helped make him, including my host grandpa. I laughed so hard I cried. I have pictures of the two of us sitting together, me in hysterics, tears running down my face. Over the next few months, I would come home from school and he would be sitting in the living room, listening to music, or taking a nap on my bed, or outside reading and enjoying the sunshine. It was hilarious.
It’s hard to decide! My Super Nintendo was freaking amazing, but I’m not sure it beats the Karate lessons.
My cat Bo, whom i just had to let go this past summer. My sister gave him to me for Christmas; he was six weeks old. 17 years is too short of a time to spend with a faithful friend like he was.
My husband is an excellent gift giver. Our first Christmas together, the poor thing took my list of possible ideas as an inventory of all that I demanded, and ran his ass off looking for every single thing on it, including a pair of Minnetonka moccasins with leather bottoms, which evidently they didn’t make anymore. He was devastated that he had to get me rubber-soled ones, and very apologetic. You know, that was 13 years ago, and I wore them yesterday.
But the gift that sprang to mind was last Xmas, my first box had a “gift certificate” for a weekend’s babysitting by my parents, the second had a confirmation page for a hotel reservation in Baltimore, and the third had tickets to Wicked, which I’d mentioned was touring, and maybe we should go see. (It also turns out he moved heaven and earth to get the tickets - they’d been sold out everywhere, so it makes it that much cooler.)
(Oh, and my daughter is the most precious person in the world to me, but she wasn’t a gift - I worked hard to make her!)
Oh, man I’m like the luckiest girl in the world when it comes to gifts.
Top gift comes from my husband, then-fiancé, on the day he proposed. And let me tell you… it being our 3 year anniversary that day, we ALL knew it was coming, so he really had his work cut out for him to make it in any way a surprise.
So we had a picnic in the local arboretum, we’re sitting by the river with our sandwiches, and he presents 2 tremendously large (3’’ thick) white plastic binders, decorated on the front and back with photographs of us and goofy in-jokes, and containing inside every single e-mail we had written to one another. You can read the progression of us from having just met, losing touch, getting in touch again, becoming ‘‘friends’’ and then ‘‘best friends’’ to obviously in love but afraid to tell one another, to just coming right out and saying it. The whole history of our relationship is right there in those binders.
Wow. Just wow.
Then he hands me a third binder, decorated in a beautiful bow our friend fashioned from a garbage bag (trust me, it was incredible.) I opened the binder and inside…
HOORAY!!!
(note: Top band was the engagement ring, bottom is the wedding band, which came later-- they have since been soldered together. I absolutelyfreakingLOVEit.)
Okay, so I’m totally spoiled.
And one of the coolest, most original gifts I got was for my 16th birthday, from my best friend. She knows of my love for Madonna. So she photoshopped a picture of my head over Madonna in some S&M gear (total silliness, more inside jokes), and she proceeded to fill a packet full of blank pages with a line from every Madonna song ever written that she felt best represented our friendship.
BTW, we’re still best friends… 8 years later. 
ETA: Oh crap, I almost forgot the SEVERAL THOUSAND DOLLARS we received as a gift when we got married, that basically enabled us to pay off all of our debt and start our financial lives over. That was priceless as well. I’m telling you, I’m just blessed in this way.
Nothing overly emo here. My “engagement ring” was a gas range with a dual-fuel oven–that was pretty spectacular. I don’t do jewelry and I have a pretty simple mokume-gane wedding band–the gas range has gotten a ridiculous amount of use and love, much more than a bauble would have. I also love the shocked look on people’s faces when I tell them about it. I love to cook and never wear jewelry other than my wedding band, so it was perfect for me.
This year for my anniversary I got an iPod touch, which I’m getting a TON of mileage out of.
One of, if not the best, presents I ever got was 4 theatre chairs from the old Cine Capri (the sorely missed single-screen movie theatre in Phoenix), for my home theatre. They really rank right up there in the “most original present” category.
My father is one of my favorite people in this whole world, he’s always been so patient and worked his ass off my whole life to keep a family of 4 afloat and support my mom, who has MS. Somehow he is an amazing planner and managed to save over the years enough money on a civil engineer’s salary to send my sister and I to college nearly loan free. He paid my sister’s tuition in full and for mine we only needed a single 7,000 loan. Of course, we both attempted to get scholarships and such but that only went so far.
Two years or so ago now it was my first year out of school and out of the house in apartment of my own. I was having hard time supporting myself in my first apartment and was stressed about commuting to work and adjusting to being an adult, so I was really excited to spend some time at home with mom and dad that year.
Dad does all the shopping except for occasional gifts mom picks out of catalogues, because it’s hard for her to get out of the house. Each of the gifts I received that year had tags on them reading, for example “wool gloves to keep your hands warm at the bus stop: $15” or “a good book that you wanted to read on the train: $6.99”
We all laughed as I read each tag out loud, all the while giving puzzled looks to Dad. Finally all the gifts were opened and Dad said “Wait, there’s one more!”
He stood up and pulled an envelope with a bow out of his pocket and handed it to me. Inside there was a card reading:
“Never having to pay your student loans: PRICELESS”
I nearly wept. It was clear he had spent time thinking up the best way to present the gift, his generosity and thoughtfulness in the presentation were just astounding. And to think that he had listened to me talk to him for months about my stresses and worries and chose to do what he could to help keep me out of debt… The depth of the gift was more than I anticipated.
I love my Dad.
My husband got me the compact OED (the one with the tiny teeny print and the magnifying glass and all of the words) for our first wedding anniversary. That’s when I knew he was a keeper. My friends were delightfully boggled.
Eventually he started knowing my taste well enough to buy jewelry (my engagement and wedding ring were old family jewelry) and that’s very sweet, but nothing beats the big dictionary.
