Awful / Awesome Gifts

One great thing about working at a school is Christmas break – excuse me, “Winter” break. The kiddoes are so darn cute the day before too. One of my kids came in this morning and greeted me with a hearty, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Carlson!” I even got a few gifts this week, which I was very surprised by. The best part about getting gifts from kids is the look on their face right before you are about to open it. You can almost feel their anxiety over whether or not you’ll like the present, which really translates in kid-language that they are anxious about whether or not you like them. Of course, you ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over everything.

The funny thing about gifts is that they can be a tricky beast. Let’s be honest, we have all gotten bad gifts. The funniest gift I ever got was meant to be a nice and meaningful gift. It was a statue of Moses with the two slabs of stone containing the Ten Commandments behind him. Come on. That’s funny. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse (or better depending on how you look at it), it lit up and it was a fountain, both of these features run on battery power. As soon as Laura e-mails me the picture, I will post it on this blog. Trust me, it's amazing. I don’t think I owned that thing for more than ten seconds before my sister, Laura asked me if she could have it. She thought it was hilarious. And she would be right. She still proudly claims it as a piece of her beloved property. In fact she told me it is the centerpiece of her kitchen table right now and for that; I will always respect her for the fine human being she is.

One of the teachers at my school got the best gift I have ever seen a student give a teacher. It is a plastic-framed poster of three, red roses, a flute and sheet music. It is impossible to look at it without laughing. It is tacky as all get-out and the fact that the student thought that this very feminine and whimsical poster would be a great gift for Mike, is awkward and awesome all at the same time. It looks like a poster I probably would have owned myself and bought from one of those Scholastic Book Fairs circa 1992. Alright, if we are being honest here, I was totally jealous of Mike’s great gift. It was way better than the ‘Happy Easter’ glass pane with a worn out bunny that the same student gave to me a couple of weeks ago. Some guys have all the luck.

As we approach the next couple of days that are filled with gift giving, I hope you are blessed with great gifts . . . or really heinous gifts that you can laugh and blog about later.