Archive for October, 2009
I’ve always thought that the gift-giving process associated with weddings is inherently flawed. We’ve all been there: the guests arrive at the wedding venue and are ushered quickly to their seats. The bride and groom are understandably busy glad-handing distant relatives and vaguely remembered acquaintances. They don’t have time to open their gifts until much later – sometimes not until after the honeymoon.
My wife and I agreed that when our friend Marvin got married we would put plenty of thought into his wedding gift. Drawing from our own experience, we wanted to stay away from kitchen appliances, as he would be getting plenty of those anyway. In order to lend a personal touch, we chose hand painted wine glasses and martini glasses. When they aren’t being used, these fine glasses can be displayed as art.
My grandmother has always been a dedicated collector of knick-knacks. Even though the ground floor of her home is kept spotlessly clean and presentable for company, I’ve seen the upstairs – where she squirrels away albums of stamps, books of rare coins and even boxes and boxes of old baseball cards. One day I came over to mow the lawn and remarked on the abundance of pewter fairy figurines she had on display over the hearth.
As it turned out, there was a perfectly practical reason why those collectibles were made of such a solid material. On Thanksgiving some years ago, when I was still a small child, I finished eating before anyone else and snuck into the living room to have a peak at the crystal figurines that were carefully arranged on a coffee table. I got a bit too daring in my curiosity and sent all of the figures toppling to the floor where a few of them shattered. In retrospect, it’s no wonder that the fragile collectibles were replaced with sturdy, durable pewter.
Flowers represent the true embodiment of a multipurpose gift. They might be sent as a token of thanks, a message of love or a sign of condolence. Florists stay in business thanks to the preponderance of people who come back to them time and again for specific floral arrangements. But what happens just a few days or weeks after the flowers are received? A vase full of wilted, decrepit blossoms is a pathetic sight indeed.
Artificial flowers of old carried an unwarranted stigma – that they didn’t look realistic enough. The style and craftsmanship in today’s selection of artificial blooms makes the old stuff pale in comparison. They’re lifelike and colorful, and cleaning them is as simple as bringing out a feather duster or a dry rag. There’s no reason to settle for flowers whose construction and color are fleeting when you could give a gift that lasts a lifetime instead.