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I LIKE THIS TOO
Submitted by Alison Storm on December 30th, 2008
Have you ever noticed how tough it can be to buy presents for people outside of your own age bracket? I never quite know what my 80-year-old grandfather would like. Does he really want another pair of slippers? And since I don’t have children myself, I find it hard to tell what toys are just right for my three-year-old second cousin. Is he too young for an ant farm? Well, I don’t think I’m the only one with this problem. In fact, I know I’m not.
Let me take you back to my freshman year of college. The year is 1998. Google just launched. The Euro made its debut and boy bands had reached the peak of their success. I was living the life that most college kids enjoy: sleep, class, eat, Jerry Springer, class, eat, sleep. I lived in a mint green house with five roommates. Our kitchen was invaded by fruit flies and the dirty dishes often outnumbered the clean ones. The shower pressure rivaled the flow from a drain pipe on a drizzly day. A Dawson’s Creek poster was our featured piece of living room artwork.
When Christmas rolled around I was likely hoping for more baby doll t-shirts (with slogans like, I’m here, what are your other two wishes), a Ricky Martin CD, and if I was really lucky, a laptop complete with a floppy drive and 64 megabytes of RAM. Maybe my grandma never got my wish list. Or maybe she was just trying to help me into the world of adulthood.
But when I opened her holiday package that year, I didn’t find sarcastic baby doll t-shirts or shiny new CDs. Instead I got a set of snowman cheese spreaders, complete with a Christmas tree holder. But wait– that’s not all. Grandma generously included six coordinating red felt placemats, edged in green rick rack ribbon and featuring snowmen in a various degrees of happiness. Two of the giant placemats would have covered the small circle surface we called our kitchen table. And the only cheese our fridge contained came inside the package of a frozen pizza.
A decade has passed and to be honest, I have yet to use either of these lovely gifts. I do still have them, though, and just last week when I unpacked the Christmas ornaments I took out the placemats, unwrapped the cheese spreader from its bubble wrap and admired them. But then I put them back in storage box where they’ll stay until next December. The good news is I no longer live amongst fruit flies and I am blessed with decent water pressure, but maybe the fact that I have yet to require a cheese spreader in life makes me uncivilized. Or maybe it means I just don’t eat enough cheese. But when that day comes– that day when I can no longer live without cheese spreader– I will know where to find one. In the attic, inside a Christmas storage box, wrapped in bubble wrap.
photo by nateOne
