The Strangest Gift

I've received a lot of gifts over the years. Since it is that time of year when everyone is caught up in gift giving, I have been thinking about a few of the gifts I've been given.

There've been great gifts, like a trip to Montreal with my sister, aunt, and grandmother. We spent a week taking in the sights, exploring all that the city had to offer and doing it all while trying to remember enough French to get by.

I've received useful gifts, like a new set of tires for my car. The old tires I had on them were nearly worn out, and my annual inspection was due in a month, and I didn't have the money for the tires. But then I didn't have to worry about it.

Sometimes, I've been given sweet, yet inappropriate gifts, like the weed my nephew brought me when he was two. He pulled it out of the ground in my back yard and came running in, giving me a "flower." Despite the fact that I started sneezing and my lungs felt ready to close up on me as soon as he opened the door, I appreciated the thought. And as soon as he left, I disposed of it outside.

I've had gifts that at first I thought were wonderful and only later did I wish I'd never accepted, like the cat my sister found for me. Nikki was a great cat--for me. And only for me. With everyone else, she did her best to arrange their timely deaths.

Along the way, there have been a few horrid gifts, like the decapitated mouse's body my cat (Nikki, mentioned above) so kindly and proudly left for me on my bed. I never did find the mouse's head.

But once, I was given a very...well...a very strange gift. It was a ceramic piece that looked sort of like a Buddha, but it had been painted so that it resembled a cross between a clown and a ballerina. And it was kind of big. Like, too big to put as the centerpiece on your dinner table, if you were to ever want to put some weird Buddha-clown-ballerina on your dinner table. It was a gift from a Secret Santa, someone I worked with, and so I thanked them...and then stuffed it at the back of a closet. I didn't remember I even had it until I was cleaning out my closets in preparation for a move several years later, at which point I threw it in a box of stuff I was sending to a friend's garage sale.

What's the strangest gift you've ever received? Have you kept it, or found some way to get rid of it? Or are you one of those people who gives strange gifts?

**Originally published at Lady Scribes**