Michael D. Davis

‘Tis the season for Christmas joy. Tis the season to give and receive crappy gifts.

Now, I’ll admit it, I don’t usually give the best gifts. The things I think about and am sure will be the big hitter fall flat, while those I just grabbed off the shelf; they end up loving. I do have an advantage though.

Ya see, I have already given the worst gift I believe I’ll ever give. So many years ago, my sister wanted to be a teacher. Ya see she is really smart if you ignore the stories I’ve told about her in this column. She has like two or three degrees, one of them a masters of something, I can’t remember.

Anyways, at one point, she wanted to be a teacher. And, this was my first time actually getting gifts. This wasn’t like Ma grabbing something for her and saying, it’s from me. No, I was gonna pick out the present, buy the present, wrap the thing, the whole nine yards. So, I got her a pig. Not an actual pig, mind you, a stuffed pig. I found it online, it had this sweet picture of a stuffed pig, and it said that it was a teaching tool. I thought it was perfect; she can use this pig to teach or whatever.

Cut to Christmas day; my sister opens up her present from me. Her reaction started as a face of horror, then melted into confusion, then landed on laughter. The pig was, to my memory, about two feet long and rather thin and cylindrical. It was dark pink and made with a thin plastic rubber. But worst of all, it had no facial features. No eyes. No mouth. No nostrils.

The only answer I had for my sister’s bewilderment was that the pig should have come with a booklet to show how to use the thing as a teaching tool. That was my only defense. She still has the thing somewhere in the dark corners of her room, in a place where its nightmarish face can’t be seen.

Another item I’m not good at is the actual wrapping of the gift. It always turns into a big knot of paper and tape. And, of course, always the opposite of myself, my sister has refined gift wrapping to an art form. She has spent hours on wrapping a single gift, using ribbon, cellophane, tape, glue, staples, everything short of a scalpel. Her gifts always turn out looking amazing, like the presents you see in movies. However, a rule has been written regarding my sister’s gift wrapping.

The better looking the present, the harder it is to open. I’m serious. You start out joking, saying it’s too nice to unwrap, then you realize she glued on the ribbon. You tear, you rip, you gouge, you use that one tooth you have with the sharpened edge, but the only thing that happens is twenty minutes passes.

Your frustration has reached record heights. You don’t care about the gift itself anymore; you’re just ticked off that this little cute package is getting the best of you. You finally end up doing what nearly everyone does when they get a gift from my sister, you get the biggest knife you can find, and you stab the thing until there’s a hole big enough to stick your fist through. It’s the only way.

I would be remiss if when talking about gift giving, I didn’t mention my father. Ya see, the old man is so bad at gift giving that when you receive a present from him, you’re left wondering if you had angered him at some point, and this was his way of retaliation. In recent years, he has more or less thrown in the towel on the whole thing, thankfully. But there was one year when he truly outdid himself.

Firstly, he decided to give himself a five-dollar-a-person spending cap. Don’t ask me why because no one else did this. When it came to gifts that year, compared to my Ma and sister, I frankly got off easy.

The present my father got me that year was a DVD of a movie he wanted to see. All in all, not too good, not too bad. The present he got for my Ma and sister was… a snow shovel. Now, that is singular.

One, a snow shovel, for both my Ma and Sister to share. I mean a snow shovel as a Christmas present is pretty horrid on its own, but then to learn you’re just a part owner. You may be wondering why the old man made his wife and daughter share custody of a snow shovel for Christmas. Well, the answer is the shovel was $10, and he’d set a five dollar per person spending cap.