Our Best & Worst Gifts
Thursday, December 24, 1998; Page E01
The ribbons and bows and wrapping paper fly off the present. It's the tool of
your dreams, or the tchotchke of your nightmares. Herein, a stocking stuffed
with gifts terrific and terrible, none of which will soon be forgotten. It was,
after all, the thought that counted.
There are a number of things I remember about Ruth, who lived in the
building across from ours on 16th Street NW when I was very young.
Tall and thin, she dusted her face chalky pale with powder, rouged her cheeks
a deep scarlet and rolled her dyed-brown hair into a '40s pompadour. Her
voice was deep and raspy, her eyes crinkly with laugh lines behind thick
glasses.
I never knew her age or whether she was widowed, divorced or a spinster,
which is what they called never-wed ladies then.
But there was no doubt that I was crazy about her. And her nephew David.
And her sister Girlie, who often visited from, if I'm not mistaken, Allentown,
Pa.
In their absence, Ruth lavished considerable affection and attention on me and
my brother. I loved visiting her apartment, where, over soup and sandwiches,
we'd have long conversations followed always by candy.
I was no more than 4 or 5 when she gave me the most wondrous present of
my short life: a brown wicker baby carriage and my very first "big-girl" doll.
I had had fabric dolls -- Little Lulu, Raggedy Ann. But this one, which for
some reason I never named, was so delicate and beautiful, with blue eyes that
opened and closed, long dark lashes, a tiny red bow of a mouth and
strawberry blond curls.
And oh, her clothing: a lavender organza dress with pink and blue and yellow
flowers embroidered at the waist, white lace at the hem and neck and,
underneath, a muslin slip.
I pushed that pram joyfully around the neighborhood and all over our small
apartment. When we moved to a house in Maryland, the carriage was
carefully loaded onto the truck along with other family treasures.
Years passed. We lost touch with Ruth and David and Girlie. The carriage fell
apart and was thrown out. But the doll was carefully put away.
Last week I took her from the closet shelf. Her lavender dress was faded gray;
she was shoeless, sockless and her hair was a fright. But looking into her blue
eyes, I was transported back to the day I got her. Thank you, Ruth. Thank
you. And Merry Christmas. --Annie Groer
We were newly married and still working out the holiday routine. So we
decided to give each other Christmas stockings, because both of us
remembered them fondly from childhood. I knew my husband tended toward
the unusual when it came to gifts; he did most of his shopping at Frager's
Hardware on Capitol Hill. So I didn't really know what to expect.
He left my stocking at the foot of the bed, the toe rounded with the traditional
tangerine (so useful in days of yore for bopping your brothers on the head),
candy canes peeking out the top. I started working my way down through
pencils, hankies and wooden spoons. This was great! Then I came across a
wrapped cylinder about three inches high and two inches in diameter.
What could it be? Wrong shape for talcum powder or bath oil; too short for
perfume. Emeralds in an unusual case? Or perhaps a strand of pearls hidden in
a toy safe! I unwrapped it eagerly.
Chain-saw oil!
Aw, honey, you shouldn't have.
--Megan Rosenfeld
My worst Christmas gift was not one I got but one I gave. It was a little play
stove, sink and refrigerator just my daughters' size. The parts were sheet
metal, with razor-sharp edges, which had to be bent and fit together, Tab A in
Slot B, according to directions obviously written by Franz Kafka. But it didn't
look difficult to assemble, and on Christmas Eve I laid out the parts on the
living room rug, mixed a festive martini and bent to my task, cheerfully
whistling carols.
Five hours and four martinis later, my thumbs were bloody stumps and I was
raging through the toy department after a desperation midnight dash to the
store, hoping to find and throttle the clerk who had left out the key inside
panel of the refrigerator door. My living room looked the lair of a
dysfunctional tinsmith.
The girls, of course, loved their play kitchen from the moment they spotted it
under the tree. They never seemed to notice the blood streaks on its surface.
And, since they were still sucking their thumbs, they saw nothing unusual
about me sucking mine.
--Ken Ringle
In elementary school, I kept a rock collection -- slate and lava and chunks of
mica. During the holidays, I would run upstairs at what is commonly termed
the Very Last Minute -- after dinner and before dessert -- and wrap a rock.
Some rumpled wrapping paper, a little tape and a beach pebble. Happy
Hanukah.
I still haven't lived this down.
--Libby Ingrid Copeland
I'm an only child. In fourth grade, as old as my own daughter now, I lived in
a third-floor apartment in a central Pennsylvania town with my parents and a
cat. We weren't poor; we weren't rich. I didn't get spoiled. My parents
worked hard at that. They had a philosophy, and it allowed for one major gift
along with the stocking-stuffers.
That year, though, I longed for two. I really wanted the set of 48 Berol
Prismacolor pencils. And I really wanted the white go-go boots. Equally and
desperately.
In the office supply store where my father worked I would stare at the
propped-up art box, its sticks of color snapped to organized attention, each
point perfect, each shade so much more vivid and exotic and grown-up than
the wax smear of crayons. But then . . . the white go-go boots. If I had the
white go-go boots, I would wear them with my red plaid kilt mini and yellow
poor-boy jersey (of course this was 1964!). And then I wouldn't be just a
tomboy with skinned knees. These go-go boots weren't the cheesy '60s cliches
that endure in memory, the white shiny vinyl that cracked across the toe. Oh
no. They were supple leather, nicely grained, with wooden stacked heels,
probably just like Marianne Faithfull's. As I remember, they cost $48 at Watt
& Shand department store.
Christmas morning came, and here is the entry from my diary, jubilant still in
my girlish round hand: "I got the pencils AND the go-go boots!!!!! I can't
believe it!!!! I never, ever, ever dreamed that would happen -- you know how
Mommy is about that sort of thing -- and I thought I would be so disappointed
over something. Oh, I am so happy!!!"
I drew and doodled incessantly all through Christmas vacation, experimented
with teal and mustard and pewter on the page. Color hypnotized me that
holiday, and when I went back to school, wearing the boots, with the plaid
skirt and yellow top, I couldn't stop staring at their stark whiteness, how they
contrasted so sharply with the mottled gray sidewalk.
I walked right into a tree.
--Ann Gerhart
I was planning to spend Christmas of 1953 in the cantinas of the Mexican
border, and as I looked around the squad room where I lived at Fort Bliss I
saw my area needed some weeding before I went, and so I stuffed a couple of
pairs of combat boots into a C-ration case and dropped by the post office and
mailed them, addressed only to OCCUPANTS at the address in East St. Louis
where I had lived for the first 19 years of my life with my mother, sister and
grandmother, who, smiling at the new Bobby, placed the package under the
tree, and found out only on Christmas morning that nothing, after all, had
changed.
--Robert H. Williams
There was one year -- the last year, it turned out -- that I was annoyingly
conscientious and efficient with my Christmas shopping, conducting all of it
by catalogue and wrapping it up by mid-November.
Of all the gifts, I was proudest of the pretty vest for my then-girlfriend. I
didn't set out looking for one -- trust me -- but I was flipping through a
catalogue, titled something pretentious like "Precious Earth Warehouse," and
there it was: The Vest. It was something like a brocade in night colors -- black
and blue with hints of autumn. There was no doubt: It was drop-dead,
bang-on, full-stop perfect for her. No better link of person and present ever
existed.
Then came Christmas morning.
I was so sure she would love the vest that I wasn't even the least bit nervous as
she ripped through the wrapping paper.
"It's wonderful!" she'd say. Or:
"It's perfect!" Which is, of course, what I thought.
Instead, what she said was:
"Oh."
She hated it. She smiled heroically and kindly and wanted to like it, but simply
could not. The colors were all wrong for her. The scale was all wrong -- the
flowers were big, she was small. It hung funny. And she never, um, wore
vests.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was what the Bad Vest meant. The
thoughts telescoped alarmingly in her head:
"How could he have bought me a present that is so wrong for me? What on
earth am I doing dating someone for FIVE YEARS who knows so little about
me?"
I know all this: She told me.
I thought The Vest would be the end of us but somehow we weathered it,
stronger for the experience.
Six months later, I bought her a blue-and-white batik dress.
This she loved. She wore it at college graduation. It was perfect, she beamed.
Two weeks later, she broke up with me.
--Frank Ahrens
In the '50s, overseas communication was not taken for granted. Air-mail
letters had to be lightweight and were written on thin blue paper and sealed in
matching envelopes with "Par Avion" printed between little wings.
Transatlantic telephone calls could take hours to place and few things short of
death or birth justified the cost. And packages traveled by slow boat to New
York and from there by train until not far from my parents' house in
Chicago, the tracks converged in a gigantic web.
Every December my mother would wait eagerly for one of those packages,
sent by her parents in Hamburg. The holidays made her especially homesick
and she would spend evenings in the candlelit living room with German choir
songs on the record player. The dim light and melancholy music tinged
Christmas with a sadness that remains in my memory far more clearly than
the joys of pageants and presents.
Except for the year the package didn't arrive. The tension and gloom built
until Christmas Eve. That day the mailman came and went. Nothing.
But then, a man and a woman drove up to our house. They had the package!
Perhaps the odd-looking European "1" that resembled a "7" was the source of
the confusion, or perhaps the all-important "S." had been left out of the
address and the package had gone an equal distance north of the Loop; I don't
remember. But there it sat, a battered bundle in smudged and rumpled brown
paper tied in thick brown twine with knots that would give Houdini pause.
The thoughtful strangers delivered more than the package; they brought a
smile to my mother's face and Christmas to our house.
I don't recall what my grandparents sent that year. It didn't really matter. The
very presence of that well-traveled box was the best gift of all.
--Rose Jacobius
Imagine the embarrassment. I'm 12, budding a chest and hating it. Interferes
with tree climbing and gymnastic maneuvers. Tradition has Dad passing out
gifts one at a time, which we open while the rest of the family watches. The
idea is to keep the gift-giving phase of Christmas going as long as possible
before the toy-breaking phase begins. Dad hands me a flat oblong box that I'm
guessing might be a wallet. With money, maybe?
As soon as I see the picture on the box, I blush and crumple the paper over it,
hoping no one will notice. My younger brothers and sisters are pawing at the
package with raw curiosity. Mom urges me to go ahead. I do, revealing the
picture of the smiling teen in a training bra. Someone suggests I try the
dreaded thing on, which I do, alone in my room.
It was too small.
--L. Peat O'Neil
My twin brother, God bless him, is a man of many talents, but gift-buying is
not one of them. His criteria, apparently, do not include taste or practicality.
I first noticed his peculiar aesthetic sensibility when we were children, and he
would buy souvenirs on family vacations. His purchases became punch lines in
our family: There was the misshapen wooden duck he bought from a peddler
in Florida, and a wide variety of tacky key chains. The creme de la creme,
though, was a goat-fur "painting" he bought at an outdoor market in Mexico.
Yes, goat fur.
A few years ago for Hanukah, he bought me a candlestick. Now, I do not use
candles nor do I have any desire to use them. You would think a twin would
know these things. And in the college dorm I lived in at the time, candles were
actually prohibited as a fire hazard.
But more significantly, the gift was some nightmarish Dr. Seuss creation, all
garish pastel blue and red polka dots, an item that yearns for hipness and fails
miserably. I suppose it would have been a good candlestick for a child's
birthday party, or for a doorstop.
It currently resides in my twin brother's apartment.
This year before Hanukah, I gave my brother a list of CDs I wanted, and the
URL for amazon.com. I figured he couldn't go wrong.
Michael Colton
It had been an incredibly stressful semester. When I went home for
Thanksgiving, my mom remarked that I looked thin.
Come Christmas morning, she tremblingly handed me a present. Whatever
was under the wrapping paper was heavy and rattled: not a book, certainly not
an album.
It was a bathroom scale. I looked at her quizzically and she burst into tears,
convinced her only daughter was anorexic. I spent the next hour calming her.
Then we ate breakfast, and she watched me swallow every bite.
--Dana Hull
At Christmas two years ago I was rooming with three guys, a cat, fish and two
ducks. It was our first holiday together. We spent the night before chatting it
up and staring at the beautifully decorated artificial tree. One by one we fell
asleep in front of the tree.
I awoke to three guys piled on the floor, one snoring. I crept upstairs,
wrapped my remaining presents and tried a stealthy approach to the tree. But
the combination of Christmas and sunshine is too much: The mind suddenly
snaps to and you're awake earlier than you've been all year.
Before long we were sipping coffee and ripping through presents. My
roommate Ted, in his neat and efficient way, had wrapped even the tiniest of
gifts. And I just tore through mine.
What I found delighted me. A miniature screwdriver neatly tucked away in a
plastic cylinder complete with interchangeable parts. Perfect for the purse.
Great for the person who lacks tools of any kind.
Since then we have all gone our separate ways. But I still have the little
screwdriver. And whenever I use it, I remember that Christmas morning
when we four had seemingly moved beyond roommates into something akin to
a family.
--Nancy Schulz |
