Weird gifts

At holiday time, our writers reflect on the strangest gifts of their lives

"It is more blessed to give than to receive," wrote Paul in The Acts of the Apostles, thereby conferring benediction on centuries' worth of givers of cheap mead, bad puddings, immortal fruitcake, plastic reindeer, promotional pens, kitten calendars, Yanni cassettes, and the countless other unwanted items that pass from hand to hand every December. Most of these fade from memory. But sometimes a gift is so spectacularly infelicitous -- or malevolent, or just plain weird -- that it lodges in our brains. Below, 12 Phoenix writers remember the things that made them go Huh?

Loot

One Christmas morning a few years ago, an Egyptian friend of mine -- let's call him Abdul -- showed up on my doorstep bearing a weathered cloth sack tied with a big red ribbon and grinning from ear to ear. "Merry Christmas!" he belted, placing the coarse bag into my hand. It was leaking sand. I invited him in, gave him a cup of coffee, and then sat down to open my gift, while he stood watching with obvious excitement. Inside the sack, I discovered a breathtaking array of what appeared to be ancient Greek coins, many of them bearing the visage of Alexander the Great. "They're worth thousands of dollars!" Abdul exclaimed triumphantly. When I asked where he had obtained such valuable relics, he shrugged and said, "In the desert at Saqqara. I dug them up." Dumbfounded, I told him I couldn't accept something that obviously belonged in a museum in his country. "But why not? They're real," he said, as if that assurance would make me more comfortable about possessing internationally smuggled Egyptian treasures. Greatly disappointed, he took them back. Later he gave me a bottle of Drakkar.

Those coins were for real, to be sure, but apparently Abdul was not: he's currently a resident of the Suffolk County jail -- awaiting trial on charges of fraud.

-- Damon Smith

The purloined letter

The weirdest gifts are the ones that make you go, "This made you think of me?" I must be an enigmatic person, because over the years I've received many head-scratchers: Dr. Seuss boxer shorts, a Spuds MacKenzie poster, a solid brass Buddha. These are not the sorts of things I would choose to surround myself with, but gifts, I suppose, say more about the giver than they do about the recipient.

It should come as no surprise, then, that my weirdest gift of all time came from my friend Andrew Boyd, a man who does guerrilla theater and writes books with titles like Life's Little Deconstruction Book. Last year, Andrew's gift to me was a large blue plastic letter A. Apparently it had once belonged to a Bank of Boston sign -- this was around the time of the BayBank-Bank of Boston merger, and all over town workmen were plucking down letters like big blue pieces of fruit.

I had to schlep the A home with me on the T, an adventure in chutzpah I'm not eager to repeat. I kept hoping I'd run into some fetching young creature with a green plastic BayBank B, but there were to be no romantic mergers that night. My A and I were alone in the world.

-- Andrew Hermann

Second cummings

There's something sentimental about a stolen gift. My behemoth edition of the complete works of e.e. cummings is stamped naperville public library in about 20 different spots. Naperville is a suburb of Chicago, where my onetime paramour was employed (at the library, no less). He wrapped the book in a tattered gray scarf, which his mother had apparently worn on her honeymoon. He sketched throughout the book in black ink from a fountain pen, and scribbled in poems of his own. "Why did you steal it?" I asked him once. "Because it reminded me of you," he replied.

Well, at least he didn't say that about a lawnmower.

-- Theresa Regli

Little wonder

I suppose I should have been flattered. I mean, other than Charlie's Angels and the Spice Girls, not many girls can say they have a doll fashioned in their likeness.

I was a freshman at Simmons College. Tommy was a boy from home who, for the past two years, had made me his primary interest. About two months before my birthday, he told me he had something special for me. I won't lie. I was broke and curious. I wanted the boots in the window of Wild Pair, and he knew it.

On the morning of my birthday, I walked out of the dorm and onto the quad. Tommy handed me a package and stepped back in triumph. I smiled with feigned surprise and tore at the paper, ready to become the owner of knee-high black leather lace-up boots. Ozzy concert, here I come!

I pulled off the lid and froze. A Barbie doll lay on a bed of pink tissue. Her bleached-blond hair had been cut to the length of mine; her feet had been painted white to resemble the Keds I always wore; she was wearing an orange muscle shirt similar to my favorite -- sleeves haphazardly cut off -- and a denim skirt stapled in the back to resemble my favorite Bongo skort. Several black bands were even painted around her right wrist to mimic my collection of rubber friendship bracelets. It was me.

And worst of all -- the thing that still bothers me nine years later -- he had used a flat-chested Skipper doll instead of Barbie herself. Not only am I the only girl I know who ever received a self-modeled doll -- I'm the only one who ever had a critical stalker.

-- Sarah McNaught

T for two

The gifts themselves weren't so strange, I guess -- it was just strange that the impulse to give them coincided. I was 11 or 12; my brother was a year and a half younger. I liked video games, he loved Legos, and when the time came to visit Toys "R" Us, that's exactly what we bought. I got my brother a book called How to Win the Video Games. When Christmas arrived he opened his presents and I opened mine. I had bought him exactly the thing I wanted, and he had bought me what he wanted: a Lego spaceship. We were a little embarrassed, and even my parents recognized they weren't exactly witnessing a frenzy of self-denial. Before the day was over, the Lego spaceship had migrated to my brother's side of the tree and the video-game book to mine. We laughed about it once in a while.

A coda to this story came many years later, when my brother and I had graduated from buying each other the presents that we ourselves wanted to buying each other presents that nobody could possibly want. He threw himself a birthday party and I brought him a book I'd picked up at a library sale: a used hardcover of Mr. T's autobiography, Mr. T: The Man with the Gold. My brother unwrapped it and placed it on his bookshelf next to the book he'd bought for my next birthday, which was . . . Mr. T: The Man with the Gold. He never actually gave it to me. I bet he'd wanted two copies all along.

-- Stephen Heuser

Who ya gonna call a dork?

In 1984, I was obsessed with Ghostbusters. The movie didn't capture my nerdy young heart so much as did the concept -- dorks saving the day by catching ghosts with cool-looking proton packs. I had posters, trivia books, action figures, recipes. And you can guess what I dressed as for Halloween that year.

What I didn't have was the theme song. The bastardized version taped off my Apple IIE Ghostbusters video game had to suffice. I didn't play the game much, but boy, did I ever boot up that big floppy to hear the Ghostbusters theme in its 64K splendor. I even learned the words as they flashed across my black-and-green monitor. Who ya gonna call a dork?

My parents must have realized how pathetic this all was, so they bought me the soundtrack for Hanukkah. A musical late bloomer, I was in awe of my first non-Mr. Rogers tape. "How did they find this?" I wondered, having no idea that several thousand were in circulation. And there were other songs on it, too (none of which I remembered from the film, of course). Suddenly a whole new world of music had opened to me. Best of all, I could now use the Apple IIE for more important things. Like penning my epic tale, "Dan the Ghostbuster."

-- Dan Tobin

Junk culture

My mother is what might be termed a thrift-store enthusiast. A junk-shop junkie. Her house is a shrine to the secondhand: mangled bric-a-brac, forlorn keepsakes, and crippled appliances huddle on every available surface. She cannot get enough of the stuff, and she is eager to share the wealth, particularly around the holidays. Inevitably, come Christmas I find myself on the receiving end of some small, gift-wrapped horror. "It's very old," she'll proclaim as she hands me a silver toothpick. "It's an antique." Right.

I know the score by now: I'll feign delight as I unwrap a cruddy plastic ("Bakelite") soap dish. "It's lovely," I'll lie as a ceramic squirrel clatters onto the considerable pile of collectibles beside me. Over the years, my mother has endowed me with an after-shave bottle shaped like a boot, a miniature Miller Lite billboard, a baize vest bearing a spot of something suspiciously like vomit, a watch that refuses to tell the time, and a stainless-steel pipe damper. "It's a collectible," she'll say. "Very valuable." I think it would break her heart if she knew how many of her little treasures wound up in the trash.

Last Christmas, my wife was initiated into the family tradition and was briefly the owner of some very questionable (though unquestionably old) lingerie. Less practiced at the ritual than I was, she oohed and aahed without conviction. My mother, meanwhile, seemed oblivious to her faux pas, beaming indulgently as the offending bustier was gingerly passed around. Didn't she know?

Later, as my wife and I staggered from my mother's house, each of us loaded up with plastic bags literally bursting with rubbish, my mum surreptitiously pressed some cash into my hand -- not a lot, but patently more than she could afford.

"Get yourself something nice," she whispered. I spent the money on beer.

-- Chris Wright

Hello, cruel world

I must be honest: I did ask my mother to buy me the Snoopy Underoos. And, yes, I also told her to pick up a pair for my best friend, Bobby. But my naiveté -- well, that was all Mom's fault.

I got my present one night of Hanukkah. Show-and-tell at school was the next day. Julie had a doll; Scott, a new baseball card; sadistic Jamie, a Chinese throwing star. And I had my Underoos. "Not only are they Snoopy Underoos," I proclaimed to the class, "but on the back there's a little Woodstock." My classmates, wary of the wrath of our teacher, Ms. Johnson, tried to giggle only under their breath. But once they saw Ms. Johnson unable to stifle her own laughter, the floodgates opened. I tried to save myself by implicating my best friend. "Bobby also has a pair," I shouted. And for the first time in my young life, I got that "I'm not with him" look. Desperate, I stared into my teacher's eyes, hoping to find a little compassion. Instead, I heard Ms. Johnson repeating over and over to herself, "The kid brought in underwear!"

-- Mark Bazer

Picture this

As sophomores in high school, my friends Rob and Andy and I had seen plenty of pictures of naked people, but we'd never actually owned any. Then one autumn evening, we sauntered into Scotty's Convenience Store, on Main Street in Winchester, Illinois (population 1700), and said this fateful word to the large woman at the cash register: Playboy.

Bingo. The next week, we tried the word Penthouse. By late fall, we had assembled a collection of five such publications.

After school on December 23, Andy and Rob showed up at my door to exchange gifts. Mom brought us a tray of sugar cookies and milk, then left the house to finish grocery shopping while we hung out by the tree in the living room. As usual, we gave each other tapes, and worked it so we'd each end up with the same two -- that year, I think, it was Billy Joel and Phil Collins. Then Andy and Rob said they'd chipped in to buy me something else, something really special, and Rob pulled a Hustler magazine out from under his sweater.

"The worst one," he said.

"Or the best," Andy said.

I'd never seen one before, and I was thrilled. But I wouldn't let them open the magazine right there: it felt wrong to look at pictures of women with their legs spread while we were sitting next to the Christmas tree (and with baby Jesus in the Nativity scene in the same room). Andy and Rob made fun of me and left the house in an angry, irrational hormonal clash that took weeks to subside.

I went to my room and looked at Hustler alone until Mom got home from grocery shopping. I was scared by the hateful way it showed women, by the bad feelings it created between my friends and me -- and by its terrifyingly exciting pictures of naked men. And although Larry Flynt probably meant Hustler for evil, and Rob and Andy probably meant the gift for fun, I think God meant it for good. Long before I could begin to imagine that I was gay, Hustler helped me realize that what I once feared were my worst desires were actually among my best.

-- Michael Joseph Gross

Trace elements

When I was 12 -- and this was months after I had publicly renounced my New Kids-lovin' ways -- my parents took the prize for Oddest Gift by presenting me with a set of New Kids on the Block stencils. The box promised endless hours of drawing and coloring fun ("Mix and match their outfits!" "Make your own New Kids style!"), and my younger sister -- who, even at age six, was hipper than I and had rejected the Kids after one rendition of "Hangin' Tough" -- promised endless hours of painful mockery. Even if I had wanted the set, I'm not sure what the point would have been -- shade Danny's head onto my notebook? Tattoo Jordan in permanent marker on my hand? Needless to say, it was retired well before New Year's.

But now that the New Kids craze is safely tucked away in the "remember when" file and Joey's trying for a solo comeback -- well, maybe when I'm home this Christmas, I'll unearth the stencils and trace a few pictures, just for old times' sake.

-- Rachel Malamud

Messing with destiny

I've seen plenty of weird gifts given over the years. There was the time Santa left my two brothers, my sister, and me a bag of oranges with a note saying that he didn't think we ate enough fruit. There was the year the Easter Bunny forgot to leave our baskets out because he'd had too much to drink the night before. And last year, my sister's husband -- without a hint of irony -- gave one of my brothers an America Online disk.

But the strangest gift by far had nothing to do with the gift itself and everything to do with the intent behind it. It was the year I received a Barbie doll and my sister a microscope. In other words, this was the year Santa tried to mess with biological destiny. Barbie dolls, as anyone knows, are for girls who can't play stickball (or pretend they can't). My proficiency in this regard -- I ranked second in the neighborhood, behind the youngest Horan boy -- alarmed both my parents. They found my younger sister's precociousness in all things having to do with nail polish, lipstick, and mascara equally alarming.

The solution? A Barbie doll for Susan, a microscope for Deborah. The wail my sister emitted upon unwrapping the microscope will follow me to my grave. My immediate and rude use of the Barbie doll as a projectile missile will likely haunt my parents until they die. Still, this Christmas had a happy ending. By the end of the day, my sister and I had negotiated a trade: the Barbie doll for the microscope, no strings attached. In the following months, I examined thinly sliced carrots, butterfly wings, and anything else that could be flattened to fit on a microscope slide. Barbie, meanwhile, found a happy home in my sister's bedroom. As for Santa? Well, he never again tried to interfere with the path of nature -- at least not on Christmas.

-- Susan Ryan-Vollmar

History or doorstop?

The weirdest gift I've ever received -- and yet it is one I truly cherish -- is a plain concrete brick. The brick is from the original Stax studio in Memphis, Tennessee, home to classic R&B singles by artists such as Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T & the MG's, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes. The brick was removed before the building's demolition in 1989 and is documented by a "Certificate of Authentication" (signed by a "brickologist") and a separate one-page history of Stax. I keep those documents in a business envelope under the brick near a closet door.

-- Jon Garelick