Grandmommy's Gifts

My mother is talking to me about my Grandmother again. Or more accurately, talking to my Grandmother when I'm around (which in this case translates into the same thing.) Grandma is upset (again,) my older sister took some things (things that were also gifts) from my younger sister, and my younger sister gave them willingly. I would understand Grandma’s issue, if she were a normal person, that gave a normal amount of gifts.

But she’s not normal. She’s Grandmommy, and she is what I have come to call a "thriftaholic." She shops for deals, at garage sales and thrift stores, if it's cheap, she’s interested. My Grandmother personally kept the Salvation Army afloat from ’83-Modern Day. The day Grandma stops shopping for deals is the day we take away her car keys, her money and her cell phone (my aunts and mother are enablers to their cores.)

Don’t take this all negatively—it worked for her, a little too well. When I was five years old, I would sit down on her multi-colored carpet in front of the Christmas Tree, next to one of my cousins, and open a box I could fit my bed into (suffice it to say this was not a typical Christmas present.)

The children would spend the rest of the evening digging through our presents, trying to catalog what we got, a task, I might add, we nearly always found to be impossible unless we got incredibly general. “This is a box full of gifts,” one of us (the cousins) would say. And the rest of us would look on and say “She is wise, mine is also a box full of gifts.” Without this very political approach you could quite easily spend the rest of the year opening one Christmas gift.

I have a theory that somewhere in her house, is a secret room with about twenty or so cubbyholes, with my family's name tags taped across the top. Each one is filled to boiling over with random toys, books and gadgets. Each year, sometime in November, I imagine she goes down those stairs with as many boxes as she feels she needs, and just reaches in and pulls out whatever it takes to fill each one. She no longer has an inclination to even look at what she’s giving to whom.

This may seem like a very efficient system, but she has caught herself in what I think of as the “Thriftshopper’s Spiral of Doom that Leads into the Penny-Pincher’s Abyss." It's a Working Title. You see, she buys more than each family member needs in a year, so she is essentially buying in advance for years to come. This would work swimmingly, if she—at some point—stopped buying. But she doesn’t. Ever.

So each year, she buys half again what she actually gives each of us. So what’s the end result? Run-on gifts. You get gifts in 1994 that you were supposed to get in '93, and so on, until eventually you're getting gifts you were supposed to get three of four years previously.

So here we are, adults in our twenties and beyond, getting boxes full of action figures, Mr. Potato Head and friends-with a few priceless gems mixed in. When I was twenty, I got my older cousins gift. A ceramic vase, printed with roses and an actual gold-enameled rose. There were recipe books for women being in shape-and a small sweatshirt. Grandma claimed she didn't mix it up. I still have the vase, it holds my favorite pens.

It’s hard to say I have any actual complaints about her system. Every Christmas for 24 (and counting) years I’ve been getting a box that outweighs me (And this is no small feat! Hah! Puns!) of some of the coolest gifts you can believe. Grandmommy's boxes are always a joy to open, it’s the grab bag of Christmas. A recipe book about only PB&J, why not? A ceramic rose? Sure. The first model of camera Kodak ever made? Every year Grandma’s boxes serve as a reminder, firstly that my Grandmother is still alive, still bringing happiness to our family, and secondly that there is no such thing as a bad gift. We’ve been told since we were children, by every Christmas movie ever made, that it’s the act of giving that counts, the spirit of the Holiday. My grandmother is the pinnacle of this feeling, the epitome of what we should want to be during the Christmas—or whatever you celebrate--season.

I hope my grandmother keeps bargain shopping for the rest of her life, it's good to know someone's out there, thinking about me. And out-shopping the average Costco Corporate buyer on her slow days.