You Really Shouldn't Have . . . by Diane Kelly

Finding the perfect Christmas gift can be difficult. I understand that. But when my daughter asked if I might like a pair of Spanx (the modern-day spandex girdle) for Christmas, it was all I could do to keep from choking the skinny teenaged twit. She thought the idea was hysterical. Let’s see if she’s still laughing when she finds her stocking full of cat box scoopings on Christmas morning. Then again, perhaps I’d asked for it when I complained about the roll of fat that has formed around my hips and belly since I turned forty awhile back. That’s the last time I’ll vent my insecurities to anyone with less than 10% body fat.

We’ve received some ill-fitting gifts over the years, and, no, I don’t just mean tacky Christmas sweaters. Back when my husband was working his way through his post-doctoral fellowship for slave wages (after working his way through graduate school at sub-slave wages), a family member gave us a lava lamp for Christmas. Now I’ve got nothing against lava lamps. In fact, we still have the lava lamp and it adds a touch of fun to the upstairs game room. Problem was, at the time we received it, we were living in southern California with two small children and an income that put us well below the poverty line. When you’re existing on a steady diet of reduced-for-quick-sale peanut butter and three-for-a-dollar boxes of mac-n-cheese, a lava lamp is about the last thing you need. We couldn’t even afford the electricity to run the thing. At that time, we also received an eighty-dollar bottle of Courvoisier cognac from another family member who is a wine and spirits connoisseur. When you’re breastfeeding a baby, alcohol isn’t exactly recommended, though on those nights when my son wouldn’t sleep I was sorely tempted. It’s not that the lava lamp and cognac were bad gifts, it’s just that the timing was off. These days, I’d love to get schnockered on high-dollar alcohol and watch gelatinous orange blogs float up and down inside a glowing lava lamp. But then? A month’s supply of diapers or baby formula would’ve come in handy. But I can’t blame the givers. They were at much different points in their lives than we were. Chances are they weren’t too thrilled by the economy-size boxes of off-brand laundry detergent we gave everyone that year, either.

Whatever is on your wish list this Christmas, I hope you get it! And if you’d love to share some of your less-than-perfect gifts, we’d love to hear about them. We promise we won’t tell.