gift

This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What’s the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?

I was blessed with many gifts this year. I lead a pretty fortunate life, I guess. I could go with the most expensive gifts (things like plane tickets that allow me to visit family, tires that keep me safe, etc.) or the most useful gifts (my Kindle, an exercise bike, clothing, etc.), or the most timely/long-lasting gifts (a really adorable owl picture, a quilt, etc.) but I think I’ll go with the sentimental.

Oh yes. Swan dish.

It’s tangible and emotional, and here’s why.

The thing with this dish is… my grandma’s getting on in years. She’s starting to…forget things. So let’s consider it from two angles.

Angle #1: A grandmother who can’t quite remember everything about her life and possessions anymore. In her living room, she has a glass makeup powder jar from the 1960s. She is sure she’s had it all her life (and generations before her). Her concern over this jar–which she thinks is a candy dish, and which isn’t necessarily stylish, rare, timeless or valuable–has become the talk of the family. How grandma wants so badly for me to have this funny blue jar with the scratched up swan perched on top. It arrives and I email out the picture above. We all laugh because, wow. Now I have a blue swan jar. I even took a series of pictures of what I might put in/on the jar. (Might post them another day, haven’t decided yet.)

Angle #2: A grandmother wishing to pass a treasured family heirloom down to her granddaughter. She has two other grandchildren who live within an hour of her, but she’s determined to mail this particular item to her other granddaughter–the one who lives 1500 miles away. She believes this has been in her family for generations — it’s a beautiful swan candy dish and she wants to make sure it ends up in the “right hands.” (Honestly, any hands would be the right ones–my cousins and their spouses are great people–but mine were the right hands for this, I guess.) She doesn’t have the proper packing materials for this dish, so she tries her best to wrap it in cloth and use sponges for padding. She is worried it will be broken in transit. Eventually, my uncle takes it to the UPS store and has them wrap it in double bubble wrap and pad the box in foam. It arrives in a massive, insured box and grandma isn’t at ease until she hears that I have received the dish intact.

So let’s level with this. The jar/dish is kind of ugly (IMHO–but I also don’t really like swans or blue). The blue doesn’t match anything in my house. I like some stuff from that era and was into depression glass and milk glass about 10 years ago… but I’m really not anymore, and I was into green and pink depression–definitely not cobalt. This isn’t depression glass anyway, it’s flashed [painted] glass (some has scratched off–that’s how you can most easily tell the difference).

But guys… think about the intentions behind this gift. To her, it *is* valuable. It is of utmost importance. And through that sentiment, it is valuable to me as well. So while I probably won’t always display it prominently (or at all) in my home, I do intend to keep it even after she’s gone.

This is the true meaning of “it’s the thought that counts.”

And when I’m in my 90s I shall wrap it in sponges and send it to *my* grandkids. ;-)