sliceoflife

Columns

	Making the most of useless gifts
	by Laurel Bill, Northern Light columnist It's that time of the year when normally rational people drag dead trees into their homes and decorate them with ornaments, tinsel and lights. Then those same normally rational people crowd into the malls in search of the “perfect gifts” for their families and friends to place under the fire hazards they've created in their living rooms.

It's been my experience, however, that many of us have been on the receiving end of the less-than-perfect gifts. Something must happen that causes normally rational people to think that they have found the ideal gift in a pet rock, a Chia Head or a 10-pound fruit cake. Maybe it's the overexposure to apple and pine smells, the never-ending barrage of jostling shoppers, or perhaps subliminal messages are laced in with the Christmas music.

Now, I don't want to sound ungrateful. I realize that Christmas is not supposed to be about the presents you get, but rather about the spirit of the season. And I know that “it's better to give than to receive” and that “it's not the gift, but the thought that counts.” However, after receiving a fair amount of useless gifts over the years, it's the amount of thought that goes into some gifts that I question.

For instance, a friend gave us an electric hot dog cooker back in the 1980s. The contraption had several spikes on each side that stuck into the hot dogs. While it cooked the wieners in seconds, it took a considerable amount of time to clean the machine afterward. Who needs such a device? How hard is it to boil, grill or microwave a hot dog?

We became regifters with that machine. It circulated around our little community of King Salmon for several years. We got it back as a going away present in 1997.

Then there was the time that one of our friends gave us a couple of “neon” fresh-water fish for our aquarium. The problem was that our friend placed the fish in a plastic bag, wrapped it and put the package under our tree two weeks before Christmas.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when we opened the parcel and found two fleshy lumps floating in water. After all, the gift was from the same man who set up his own aquarium after he'd seen ours and remarked, “I never realized that fish drank so much water,” when he noticed the aquarium's water level dropped each day. We kept the pretty foil wrapping paper and flushed the fish.

But I think the most memorable useless gift we ever received was a gift that my husband, Don, and I gave each other in the early years of our marriage. We'd received a notice stating that we'd won a “portable sauna for two.” All we had to do to collect this prize was send $46.95 to the company for shipping and handling and the unit would be ours.

Since we were short on money that year, Don and I had agreed that our Christmas presents to each other could not exceed $50. So, we decided that the sauna would be our joint gift. We sent off a check for the freight, thinking that a sleek, fiberglass unit would soon appear on our doorstep.

What actually appeared was a cardboard box containing metal sticks and a large plastic cover. After we got all the metal pieces together and attached the plastic, we ended up with a flimsy frame supporting a shower-curtain-like sack with two holes in the top for our heads to stick through. The fine print on the instructions read, “Place two kitchen chairs inside unit and set a vaporizer, filled with water, on the floor in between the chairs. Climb inside the tent, turn on the vaporizer and enjoy your portable sauna.”

We had a good laugh, then hauled the tent out to the Naknek River, turned it upside down and used it as an ice-fishing shack. After all, it was a two-holer.

I can't wait to see what Christmas will bring this year.