” …the packet was long and hard. It resisted the touch and had a sort of funnel shape.
“It’s a toy pistol!” said the boy, trembling with excitement. “Gee! I hope there are lots of caps with it! I’ll fire some off now and wake-up father.”
No, my poor child, you will not wake your father with that. It is it useful thing, but it needs not caps and fires no bullets and you cannot wake a sleeping man with a tooth brush. Yes it was a toothbrush – a regular beauty… and ticketed with a little paper ‘Hoodoo, from Santa Claus’.”
“Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas” from “Literary Lapses” by Stephen Leacock.
—————————————————————————–
I once asked a group of friends, at a post-Christmas gathering, to describe various Christmas presents they had received over the years under the categories “longest”, “smallest”, “most useless”, “weirdest” etc.
Harry nominated a cast iron lawn dog for the heaviest category. It was obviously a re-gifted present that was passed on to Harry (who doesn’t have a lawn) because the givers had been given this gift by another giver and recognised how huge and impractical it was. However we all pointed out that Harry had missed an opportunity when he re-gifted it, as he could have used it as a boat anchor for his fishing dinghy.
Holly remembered receiving a double ended kayak paddle as her “longest” Christmas present. Unfortunately she had sold her kayak some months before and she had moved into a micro apartment and her paddle would only fit in by placing it diagonally from the top corner of one wall to the bottom corner of the opposite wall, somewhat impeding movement in her tiny house but greatly increasing her gymnastic ability. I think she sold it for firewood to a neighbour with a micro fireplace.
Hugo’s father once gave him a golf club with which his father had hit a hole in one in 1957. A large brass plate was attached to it, describing Hugo’s father’s glorious achievement in detail. Hugo was told by his father to treasure it and pass it on to his own son (whose sporting interests extended to computer games and chess). Not wanting to disappoint his father, Hugo hung it in a prominent position on the wall of his back veranda where it came in very handy for freeing up the float valve on his water tank pump when it got stuck.
Book presents can be a mixed blessing. Hayley said she once received a book for Christmas from a book club friend who told her “the first three quarters is pretty heavy going but it gets quite exciting towards the end”. Unfortunately the book was 996 pages long and Hayley was not sure she had enough lifetimes to persevere for the really exciting ending, so she uses the book to raise the viewing height of her computer monitor.
The group were getting into it by now and nominated a few just plain weird Christmas presents they had received or given:
– a guinea pig toast rack with long slots in the rodent’s unfortunate body to hold the toast
– a battery-powered piranha fish from the joke shop to slip into the pool at the next pool party to terrify your friends (“you should have seen your face when the piranha latched onto your…”).
We all agreed about being careful when purchasing Christmas gifts online. Hannah once bought a vase to give as a Christmas gift. It was the perfect colour for her friend’s lounge room. Unfortunately she forgot to check the dimensions. When it arrived she discovered that the vase was the size of a small basketball player and only suitable for a hotel ballroom.
Heather warned us it is always a good idea to check any foreign language slogans on presents you buy overseas.
She was horrified to discover a cute Peppery Pig T-shirt had a foreign language tag-line that said when translated “she looks like a sow and smells like a boar”. No doubt the tourist shop proprietors had a good guffaw every time an ignorant foreigner bought one.
By this stage of our Christmas confessions we started talking about “Christmas gifts that give back”.
Hans, whose wife is partial to gambling, once gave his beloved her own personal poker machine. She would put lots of real money into it and occasionally win the jackpot. But as with all gambling, the house always wins. It was a nice little earner for Hans in his retirement.
Personally I like to give goats. No, I don’t pick one up from the goat farm and present it on Christmas Day to eat the Christmas tree and forage among the hors d’oeuvres. I mean a charity goat to give to a third world family who know how to benefit from those productive creatures. I insert the charity’s “give a goat” gift card into the Christmas card with the sign off “from one old goat to another” which is usually true, slightly insulting and still charitable. A goat gift is more likely to leave the world a better place than a cast iron lawn dog. But then again, if the iron dog could somehow be given to a poor third world fishing family, its reuse as a boat anchor could benefit generations.
Harry always likes to have the last word in any of our cordial confabulations. His extended family has established a re-gifting ritual. Each Christmas, last year’s recipient re-gifts a Furry Fox figure to a random family member. Furry Fox is only about the size of someone’s hand and is made from real fox fur and started out as quite glossy haired and cute. However numerous wrappings and rewrappings, the effects of being thrown back at the current year’s giver, plus the ravages of moths, family pets and the mouths of small children have all taken their toll on ol’ Furry. He is beginning to look distinctly worn and wasted. But he soldiers on. For Harry’s family the ritual of Furry Fox encapsulates what their Christmas gift giving is all about.
-Geoff Milton
