This piece first appeared in December 25th, 2008 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/
Grandmas are lousy gift givers.
Well, maybe all of them aren’t lousy at giving gifts, but mine was. Okay, she wasn’t always lousy at giving gifts. When I was a little boy, Grandma Braver gave me a toy helicopter. She gave toy helicopters to my three cousins as well. I’m sure the helicopters would have been considered cheap toys back then, but to us they were the greatest toys ever.
They were made of pressed tin and the only plastic things on them were the windows and the lights. The rotor blades may have been plastic, but I seem to recall them being made of metal as well. They were battery powered, and when you turned them on the rotors whirled and the lights flashed.
Christmas Day at Grandma’s was kind of like Christmas Part II, for us kids. My immediate family has always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. This worked out well because it freed up Christmas Day to go to Grandma’s and get together with my dad’s side of our extended family. That also meant that we would have a whole new batch of gifts to open. Grandma would buy us these great toys, and to thank her we would make general nuisances of ourselves for the rest of the day.
We would drive my grandma, my mom and my aunts crazy with all of our running around. They would eventually be pushed to the brink of sanity and scream at us to go play down in the basement.
The basement was another world. It was a world where my grandpa, my dad and my uncles would go to escape us kids. They would also play poker and smoke cigarettes at a table that was set up in the middle of the basement. I’m sure now that this was the only reason any of them agreed to get together on Christmas. If there wasn’t a deck of cards around, all these guys could do was argue.
We children would manage to play in the basement for five or 10 minutes and then we would be ordered to quit making so much noise and go back upstairs. This up and down scenario repeated itself several times until we found ourselves just playing on the stairs between levels. This would ultimately lead to us being yelled at by both groups of grown-ups at the same time.
The years went by and my cousins and I became more interested in the poker game in the basement than playing with toys. There were fortunes to be won and lost. Grandma knew we were getting older, and she was very good at buying us gifts that were well suited to our age. To a teenager a gift pack of Old Spice and Skin Bracer was like a rite of passage. Grandma knew that we were men now, and men shave ... even if they have no need for shaving.
As we grew older the gifts from Grandma became practical. Pen and pencil sets, tri-fold wallets, driving gloves, high quality button-up shirts that were actually the right size. Grandma Braver seemed to have a knack for buying very useful gifts.
I was well into my 20s when I realized this fact.
One year, a few weeks before Christmas, I was talking with my mother about the upcoming holiday. I wondered out loud what Grandma Braver would give me this year. I told my mom that Grandma’s gifts were always so useful, so practical. They were never overly expensive gifts; they were rarely something that I couldn’t live without. They were just well thought out gifts.
My grandparents, by this time, had started visiting my parent’s house on Christmas Eve. They were getting up in years and it was getting too hard for them to host a houseful of guests on Christmas Day. They would stop out at my parent’s house for a few hours, drop off their gifts and then go home, usually before the rest of us would open our gifts.
During the gift opening that evening, I was a little more anxious than I had been in previous years. I had no expectations but I was anticipating a useful and thoughtful gift from Grandma Braver.
I opened the package, and to my surprise and amazement, my grandma had given me, quite possibly, the most useless gift I had ever received up to that point of my life.
After all of the self-imposed hype about my grandma’s wonderful gifts, this year she gave me a cheap, plastic perpetual motion space shuttle thing. It consisted of a weighted base with two support arms, on which rested a ring that was about seven inches in diameter. Inside the ring was a little space shuttle on one end of a rod and a Saturn-looking planet thing at the other. In between the two was an axis that would allow the shuttle and the planet to spin around and around. Because there was no motor, it gave the illusion of perpetual motion. It was actually propelled by a nine-volt battery and an electro-magnet in the base.
I don’t know if I had ever been so disappointed with a gift in my entire life. I had no use for this thing, whatsoever. So much for useful and practical gifts from Grandma.
This week, I hadn’t really planned on writing a Christmas-themed column, but I was looking at the space-shuttle-perpetual-motion-thing-a-ma-bob and I thought it might be worth writing about.
Grandma Braver gave me a lot of useful and thoughtful gifts over the years, but not a single one of those gifts survives today. Every one of them has worn out or broken or met some other fate. Yes, I still have the perpetual motion thing. It still works. It’s nearly 20 years old.
Over the years it has been carelessly thrown into moving boxes on several occasions. It has sat neglected on shelves for years on end. A year or two ago it took a 16-foot plunge to the hardwood floor beneath my balcony, and it still works like it did when it was new.
Who would have guessed that this lousy gift would turn out to be one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. It isn’t great because of how it works, or even that it works after all these years. It’s great because every time I see it, which is almost every day, I think of my grandma and how great she was. She died a dozen years ago, and it may have been the last gift she gave me. If it isn’t the last one, it is the last one I can remember.
Grandmas are lousy gift givers.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Well, maybe all of them aren’t lousy at giving gifts, but mine was. Okay, she wasn’t always lousy at giving gifts. When I was a little boy, Grandma Braver gave me a toy helicopter. She gave toy helicopters to my three cousins as well. I’m sure the helicopters would have been considered cheap toys back then, but to us they were the greatest toys ever.
They were made of pressed tin and the only plastic things on them were the windows and the lights. The rotor blades may have been plastic, but I seem to recall them being made of metal as well. They were battery powered, and when you turned them on the rotors whirled and the lights flashed.
Christmas Day at Grandma’s was kind of like Christmas Part II, for us kids. My immediate family has always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. This worked out well because it freed up Christmas Day to go to Grandma’s and get together with my dad’s side of our extended family. That also meant that we would have a whole new batch of gifts to open. Grandma would buy us these great toys, and to thank her we would make general nuisances of ourselves for the rest of the day.
We would drive my grandma, my mom and my aunts crazy with all of our running around. They would eventually be pushed to the brink of sanity and scream at us to go play down in the basement.
The basement was another world. It was a world where my grandpa, my dad and my uncles would go to escape us kids. They would also play poker and smoke cigarettes at a table that was set up in the middle of the basement. I’m sure now that this was the only reason any of them agreed to get together on Christmas. If there wasn’t a deck of cards around, all these guys could do was argue.
We children would manage to play in the basement for five or 10 minutes and then we would be ordered to quit making so much noise and go back upstairs. This up and down scenario repeated itself several times until we found ourselves just playing on the stairs between levels. This would ultimately lead to us being yelled at by both groups of grown-ups at the same time.
The years went by and my cousins and I became more interested in the poker game in the basement than playing with toys. There were fortunes to be won and lost. Grandma knew we were getting older, and she was very good at buying us gifts that were well suited to our age. To a teenager a gift pack of Old Spice and Skin Bracer was like a rite of passage. Grandma knew that we were men now, and men shave ... even if they have no need for shaving.
As we grew older the gifts from Grandma became practical. Pen and pencil sets, tri-fold wallets, driving gloves, high quality button-up shirts that were actually the right size. Grandma Braver seemed to have a knack for buying very useful gifts.
I was well into my 20s when I realized this fact.
One year, a few weeks before Christmas, I was talking with my mother about the upcoming holiday. I wondered out loud what Grandma Braver would give me this year. I told my mom that Grandma’s gifts were always so useful, so practical. They were never overly expensive gifts; they were rarely something that I couldn’t live without. They were just well thought out gifts.
My grandparents, by this time, had started visiting my parent’s house on Christmas Eve. They were getting up in years and it was getting too hard for them to host a houseful of guests on Christmas Day. They would stop out at my parent’s house for a few hours, drop off their gifts and then go home, usually before the rest of us would open our gifts.
During the gift opening that evening, I was a little more anxious than I had been in previous years. I had no expectations but I was anticipating a useful and thoughtful gift from Grandma Braver.
I opened the package, and to my surprise and amazement, my grandma had given me, quite possibly, the most useless gift I had ever received up to that point of my life.
After all of the self-imposed hype about my grandma’s wonderful gifts, this year she gave me a cheap, plastic perpetual motion space shuttle thing. It consisted of a weighted base with two support arms, on which rested a ring that was about seven inches in diameter. Inside the ring was a little space shuttle on one end of a rod and a Saturn-looking planet thing at the other. In between the two was an axis that would allow the shuttle and the planet to spin around and around. Because there was no motor, it gave the illusion of perpetual motion. It was actually propelled by a nine-volt battery and an electro-magnet in the base.
I don’t know if I had ever been so disappointed with a gift in my entire life. I had no use for this thing, whatsoever. So much for useful and practical gifts from Grandma.
This week, I hadn’t really planned on writing a Christmas-themed column, but I was looking at the space-shuttle-perpetual-motion-thing-a-ma-bob and I thought it might be worth writing about.
Grandma Braver gave me a lot of useful and thoughtful gifts over the years, but not a single one of those gifts survives today. Every one of them has worn out or broken or met some other fate. Yes, I still have the perpetual motion thing. It still works. It’s nearly 20 years old.
Over the years it has been carelessly thrown into moving boxes on several occasions. It has sat neglected on shelves for years on end. A year or two ago it took a 16-foot plunge to the hardwood floor beneath my balcony, and it still works like it did when it was new.
Who would have guessed that this lousy gift would turn out to be one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. It isn’t great because of how it works, or even that it works after all these years. It’s great because every time I see it, which is almost every day, I think of my grandma and how great she was. She died a dozen years ago, and it may have been the last gift she gave me. If it isn’t the last one, it is the last one I can remember.
Grandmas are lousy gift givers.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
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