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I LIKE THIS TOO
Submitted by Alison Storm on December 18th, 2008
I have a small circle of high school friends. Even though we live in five different states we work hard to keep in touch. We exchange phone calls and e-mails and birthday cards. We’ve forked over big bucks for bridesmaid dresses for each other’s weddings. We’ve spent large chunks of our paychecks on plane tickets to Vegas for our annual gathering. And every year we buy each other Christmas presents, carefully wrap them up, and ship them off as another way to show our friendship.
But this year one of girls in this intimate circle (we’ll call her Friend B) decided that with the state of the economy our decade-old tradition of exchanging Christmas gifts should be halted. Friend B’s e-mail read,
‘the main thing that I wanted to bring up is the gift exchange thing. I know that every year I feel very strapped financially and I also don’t have as much time to shop for great gifts as I would like… so I was thinking that maybe we should not exchange gifts this year due to all of the economic strain and all of us having not as much free time as we would like. What do you think about this idea? If you still really want to do the gift thing let me know, but I will just have to do small items.’
Those two little words, “small itemsâ€, brought me back to Christmas 2006. My then boyfriend, sister and I were chatting in my living room. Friend B’s gift had just arrived in the mail, shipped all the way from her home out west to me in South Carolina. My hefty miniature pincher Bruno sat next to me on the couch. Back then there really wasn’t anything miniature about Bruno. He weighed in at a whopping 16 pounds, which would probably have pushed him into the “obese†category among min pins. I opened the padded manilla envelope, grabbed the crumpled tissue paper and unwrapped the gift hiding inside. I pulled out a tiny pleather jacket with the words “bad to the bone†embroidered on the back. The three of us looked from the minuscule coat to my pudgy Bruno and started laughing hysterically.
Even if Bruno were to diet like a super model this jacket would never fit him. It was made for a tiny teacup poodle, a baby Chihuahua, or maybe a skinny squirrel. Just to prove my point I picked up my Coke can and wrapped the jacket around it. The zipper barely closed. We all laughed even harder at my new pleather Coke koozie.
The following summer I sold the diminutive doggie jacket at a yard sale to someone who thought it was doll clothing. Oh well, I got a dollar and a good laugh out of it, which is probably more than I’ll get from Friend B this year.
