I'm valiantly trying to get rid of some items that have been taking up space in the house but that won't be going with us on our eventual move. A few of these items are things we were gifted with but that have zero chance of being used by us. Some are duplicates of things we already own. Some are the wrong size, color, type for us. And then there are those that are just so strange that we can't figure out why any manufacturer made them, never mind who would really use them.
What I began to think of was what was the strangest gift we ever got. In our case it's really no contest. When we got married an aunt of my husband's bought us a 2-foot high ceramic umbrella stand in the shape of the ugliest frog you have ever seen, replete with a fly on its tongue. Luckily for us a visitor didn't turn on the hall light, bumped into the frog, which we had shoved into a corner, and cracked it beyond repair. Unfortunately for us hubby's aunt asked about the frog when she visited us. I went into melodrama mode and tearfully told her how the frog had gotten broken. I must have overdone it because that week a package arrived to the house with a replacement frog in it, an even more bilious color of green than the original had been. That frog lived a while longer than the first one, hidden in the corner of one of the closets, and then "somehow," when we next moved, it didn't make it onto the moving truck. And you can bet that I took special care not to mention that frog any where around our aunt.
A friend once got a hostess gift that had her scratching her head. It was a set of small bottles of vegetable-based food coloring to be sprayed on popcorn to turn it all kinds of interesting colors. One motzoai Shabbos she brought out for our delectation and delight bowls of blue and red and purple and green popcorn. Okay, interesting to look at, but purple popcorn?
In this season when people are out there trying to find the perfect gift for someone for Chanukah, tell me about some of those "perfect" gifts you've been the recipient of.
2 comments:
What??!!?!
Share the info with you and worry for the rest of my life whether or not the giver reads your blog? I'm not as brave a you ;) ....
I will share with you though the time our Chanukah guest brought us Chanukah themed sodas as a gift.
Trust me.
I'll stick with Coke.
There was that really ugly wooden tray with three-dimensional faux fruit that we got for our wedding.... I turned it over, drilled a hole, and turned it into a really cool wall clock. It now hangs in our living room.
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