Tyee Writers on Their Best Presents Ever

If you’re struggling with the idea of Christmas or holiday presents, you’re not alone. Even in the before times, when you could troll stores for weeks on end to find the exact right something for Uncle Eddie and Cousin Malachy, it was a slog.

This year it’s best to avoid malls and department stores as much as possible. Instead, how about sharing memories of the BEST PRESENT EVER!

The Tyee asked our writers and staff to contribute stories about the most memorable gifts they ever received during the holiday season. It’s a cornucopia of tales — funny, sweet and even a little dangerous.

Happy holidays from Team Tyee!

Christopher Cheung, reporter

When I was nine, my younger brother received a Crayola Crayon Maker. We’d never seen anything like it. At the top of the machine was a tray to place our broken crayons. You’d turn on the device to melt the pieces back into wax. Then you’d flip a lever to pour the melted wax into four crayon-shaped molds. And then they’d cool…. Voila! New crayons!

You could use the machine the utilitarian way as a mender of broken crayons, but we went the Frankenstein route of purposefully snapping our crayons into tiny pieces for maximum effect. We were mesmerized by the melting, marbling wax. It was the year that The Fellowship of the Ring came out in theatres; that Christmas we felt like Crayola Sauron forging his One Ring.

Moira Wyton, reporter

I’ve been exchanging gifts with roughly the same group of friends for nine years in a covert Santa operation we’ve been running since Grade 10, when enough of us had jobs that giving a small gift felt like a sliver of independence.

Two years ago, my secret Santa got me a small notebook I was told not to flip through at all. To find out what was inside, I’d have to write and discover the contents as I filled pages! It was the first holiday season I had been considering pursuing journalism, the last before I graduated university, and the invitation to write for the sake of discovery was much needed to get through my senior slump.

Intrigued, I scribbled down thoughts and notes I never normally would have put to paper in my hardback notepad reserved for work. It filled much more quickly than I expected, though none of the entries were dated and I didn’t stress about organizing or making it beautiful. Inside I found beautiful vinyl stickers, notes from my friend and a $10 bill to use for a coffee.

I haven’t removed them from the notebook in the year since finishing its pages, although I’m sure I’ll be short a bill and dip in eventually. For now, the notebook is a small but flush reminder to write no matter the reason.

Amanda Follett Hosgood, reporter

The Christmas I was five, all I wanted from Santa was a diamond ring. It was the year after I asked for a star for the tree and my parents had fashioned something out of tinfoil. I think I was looking for something of similar size and bling, inspired by a family heirloom I’d found in the back of my mother’s dresser drawer.

Christmas morning rolled around, and I was so overwhelmed by the small box under the tree that I hid in a corner to open it. I remember pulling the simple gold band with tiny diamond chip from the box and, to be honest, feeling a little deflated. This wasn’t the sparkling solitaire I’d had in mind.

Nonetheless, I’ve worn that ring all 40 Christmases since. Now dented and misshapen, it worked its way down my fingers as I grew to find its final resting place on my pinky finger. It’s one of a few pieces of jewelry I wear regularly and the only one that’s lasted most of my lifetime.

Em Cooper, outreach manager

When I was in Grade 4, my Grandmama won a radio station contest with a hand-penned letter illustrating how much it would mean to have all of her family together for Christmas. The prize was a trip to Montreal for our West Coast family.

I had my real first winter: sledding on a GT Snowracer, watching my dad and uncles argue over who would get to pay for beer, laughing at stories of watching SNL (with my dad re-enacting the Bass-o-matic sketch). The family shared stories of driving great distances to pick up my uncle for a party, dumping buckets of water on each other’s heads, all of this while they were wild teenagers, and my grandmother, a single parent by then, along for the ride, enjoying the jokes, feigning disapproval, happy to have a house full of young people.

I was gifted my first CD, Weird Al’s TV Album, on Christmas morning. I continued to like Weird Al long after my friends grew out of his nasally song parodies in favour of harmonies from All Saints or the Cardigans. I like his writing, his commitment to finding the connective thread, even if it is silly. I guess that follow-through and tomfoolery are a family trait that I carry. I type this from Grandmama’s yellow writing desk, remembering how her love of family and stories brought us together that year, and how our collective sense of humour made it memorable.

Katie Hyslop, reporter

Anxiety has been my constant since I left the womb, but what kept me up at night as a child was horrible ways to die. Ebola? Check. Mad cow disease? You betcha. Eaten by a Minke whale while crossing the Gulf of St. Lawrence on a passenger ferry with my family? Long story, but yes.

I was nine years old when former Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis, a.k.a. flesh-eating disease. It took his leg and my attention. I was obsessed with the thought of contracting it myself. Everything else I feared, I thought I was safe from in Newfoundland (as long as I stayed on dry land). But flesh-eating disease, it turns out, could strike anyone at any time.

Eventually I did get over this fear, mainly because it never happened to me or anyone I knew. But my sister never forgot, and one Christmas in my early 20s she gifted me with a giant microbe of necrotizing fasciitis, complete with a little silver fork and spoon on its tummy. I still have it today and it continues to make me giggle. What can I say? I like to laugh in the face of flesh-flaying danger.

Jeanette Ageson, publisher

For me, it’s a tie between two very different Christmas presents. One of my favourite gifts ever is a pair of down-filled pants that I got when I started taking an interest in camping in the snow. They look ridiculous on my small frame, but there is something extremely satisfying about sitting outside in a snowbank with a well-insulated bottom.

My other favourite gift is a clothing steamer that I got from my parents. Actually, I think the down pants were from them as well! For one, it’s useful and cuts down on having to haul out an ironing board. But also, because I got it in a stage of my life where I was starting to become more delighted with practical things. It marked a time for me when I could admit that getting a clothing steamer gave me the same delight that I used to get from more shiny pleasure-driven things.

Sarah Krichel, social media manager

Growing up, I became accustomed to the awkward dance of living in a household with a Christian mother and a Muslim father. December would roll around and my dad would mind his own business, respectfully not celebrating, while my mom, sister and I unwrapped socks, sweet perfumes or — if we were lucky — a Nintendo DS game we begged our mom for that year.

My birthday is just eight days before Christmas, and my sister’s 11 days after. Suddenly to our surprise, as some sort of super-mega-combo present one year, my dad told us he’d buy us flights to his childhood home of Rabat, Morocco. In summer 2017 we met uncles and aunts for the first time ever, met a cousin with whom we’d communicated online for years (only to learn she’s more like a third sister than a cousin), baked handmade meloui with our tough, 90-plus grandmother and visited the mountains and desert where all her children were born. Best of all, we brought souvenirs back home with us — the aromas of which would transport my dad back to the antiquated medinas to which he hasn’t returned since he left almost 35 years earlier.

Nothing about this gift screamed Christmas, but the once-potent crossing of religions hardly felt relevant anymore.

Andrew MacLeod, BC legislative bureau chief

I still have the box for the Star Wars X-wing fighter I received more than four decades ago. The movie had recently been released, and the heavily marketed toys tied to it were must-haves that year. An R2-D2 button (TM) opened the X-wings (TM) to “attack position.” With batteries — not included — it would make a “flashing ‘laser’ light and space sound!” Fun for a while, the toy and I parted ways long ago.

That same year I also received $5 visiting my dad’s aunt at her nursing home. My family wasn’t religious, my mom having been raised Catholic before escaping everything but the guilty feelings, but I knew with that $5 I wanted to buy a creche. At the market downtown I’d seen the one, a simple exposed-timber affair, daubed in paint, covered in dried moss and stamped “Made in Italy” on the back. Just plastic Joseph, Mary, Jesus and a pair of lambs present.

The appeal may have been the simplicity of the scene, the baby being revered at the centre of it, or some atavistic faith, I don’t know. But that creche has stuck around, and when it comes out of the red and black Star Wars box each year, it reminds me of my dad’s aunt, a generation now long gone, family together and my own time of innocence. So yes, my best gift was $5.

Tara Campbell, home page editor

An ocean of tile separated my room from my parents’ room. The tree was in the middle. Late at night on Christmas Eve, I could always hear crinkling paper, snipping scissors and sighs as my mother fastidiously prepped gifts late into the night. One particular year, it was accompanied by sounds of the sewing machine: the race of the presser foot, the thread-feed dogs hard at work.

My mother had always sewn. Our Halloween costumes were works of art. One year my sister went as Rainbow Brite, surrounded in rings of marshmallow colour.

As my sister and I ran to see what lay beneath the tree on Christmas morning, I locked eyes with a handstitched cloth rabbit, adorned in a red dress with a pattern of smaller rabbits circling its width. I eagerly picked up the floppy animal to behold its details when I noticed the circle skirt was upside-down.

It wasn’t until we gathered in the living room that my mother realized what happened. Her eyes looked at me, heavy from the night before, as though requesting forgiveness from this slip from perfection. Perhaps I couldn’t name it then, but I loved that the rabbit had run astray with the tailored plan. The idiosyncrasy contained multitudes: the rabbit with the upside-down skirt was right on point.

In the morning light, I held the rabbit tight. Twenty-some years later, I remain endeared by the images upturned and the rabbit’s bold, accidental gesture toward imperfection.

Jen St. Denis, reporter

My husband always gets me a perfect present, while I get him something like socks or an exhaustive book about the geography of British Columbia (“Oooh look, an entire chapter on lichen!”)

I’ve never made it through his favourite “classics of literature” novel, Moby Dick, but he has obliged me by reading Pride and Prejudice. This means he understands my references to Mr. Darcy throwing a man-trum or Lydia making a salad, but his jokes about how “the whale is a fish!” go completely over my head.

A few years ago, he bought me a $6 mug he happened to see at a bookstore. It’s covered in quotes from various Jane Austen novels, and I love it so much. It’s on my desk filled with tea as I write this. There are sappy quotes (“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more,” “Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love”) but it’s the more ridiculous ones my gaze usually falls on, because of how they’re positioned on the cup. “One cannot have too large a party,” from Emma (you most certainly can have too large a party, especially if you’re an introvert like me) and “People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them,” from Sense and Sensibility.

I don’t know why it delights me to remember that there have always been insensitive, greedy and foolish people in the world, but it does. Maybe this Christmas I’ll give my husband the present of finally reading Moby Dick.

Bryan Carney, director of web production

I think my favourite Christmas present would have to be the American Fender Stratocaster my parents got me when I was around 10 years old.

It was a late ‘80’s Tobacco Sunburst-coloured beauty that I saw and lusted after in the local hock shop. In those days, I was unsuccessfully attempting to smush my then-very curly hair into a centre-parted, layered undercut in the style of Kurt Cobain.

The deal was, that because it was a big-ticket item, it would be both my birthday and Christmas present (any kid with a December birthday has been birth-mased — but at least this time it was by choice.)

And I also had to pay some of it down over time. It was kept in my parents’ bedroom on layaway, while I slowly made allowance and paper route payments. I believe I was let off a bit early on the plan, and soon I was in my basement making hideous distortion pedal noise with friends for months on end.

I stupidly traded it in towards a new Chinese-made Epiphone with nowhere near the resale value, when I later decided that hollow body Elliott Smith or Beatles sound was where it was at. And I carry guilt for that moment and my lapsed payment plans to this day. Thank you for allowing me to take those off my chest.

David Beers, founding editor

My best Christmas presents of course have been wholesomely affirming of both the giver and myself. Handmade cards and drawings and songs from my kids. A mixtape from my spouse. A tin of favourite molasses cookies from my mom. Ah to love and be loved. But the best Christmas present I received as a child spoke to something more… depraved.

It was the Secret Sam Attaché Case, which after a season of wheedling I received with tremendous relief and joy the Christmas I was eight years old. In an era when spy shows ruled TV, this commercial hawked Topper Toys’ “most amazing secret weapon ever!” Really, it was more a training kit for the budding sociopath. The case contained a periscope for learning how to become a peeping tom, a hidden camera for further robbing people of their privacy, a scoped rifle that broke down into components like a junior AR-47, and, for a frisson of extra firepower, the briefcase itself shot bullets. What more could a boy need?

That was the year I wandered the sidewalks of our tract home development, a four-foot-tall assassin in short pants carrying his black attaché, blending in perfectly with America’s Cold War hallucination.

Dorothy Woodend, culture editor

Christmas was always a time for new records. Kiss’s Love Gun, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, ABBA’s Super Trouper... certain albums summon up a time and place so powerfully, it’s as if a film was unspooling behind my eyes, complete with a rocking soundtrack.

One year, my twin sister and I got Disco Fever, a compilation album that featured Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, and that paean to mid-70s debauchery and decadence, the Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant.” We played that song until it wore a groove in the vinyl, screaming the lyrics in hysterical ecstasy: “Your body, my body, everybody wants your body.” Finally, my parents were forced to hide the album in a desperate bid for self-preservation and sanity.

The best present we ever received was a matching set of pocket-sized transistor radios the Christmas that we were 10-years-old. The tradition was that we were allowed to open one present on Christmas Eve, but choosing the right one was an agonizing process, requiring close examination, rigorous shaking, and even some discreet tearing of corner paper. Horrors, if you picked the wrong one and got clothes. Do overs were not happening.

But that year, we chose well. We stayed up a good portion of the night, tuning in distant radio stations from Spokane, Washington, and even Vancouver. I remember the giddy sensation and melancholy glamour of hearing songs from faraway places, wafting out on the crystalline night sky. A promise of thrills and excitement and disco fever that I barely even understood, but that I knew I wanted.