It’s time to think about holiday giving. People aren’t
getting much from me this year; if I have the strength to bake a few Russian
teacakes and put them in cute little containers, that’ll be about the size
of it.
But some years I do better. There are always catalog gifts
(who doesn’t like a cheese wheel?). And sometimes I come up with something
absolutely brilliant, which then falls flat.
One year Partner came up with the best gift ever: bottles of
Patti
Page maple syrup, straight from New Hampshire. Patti Page was a 1950s singer who,
upon retirement, moved north, bought a maple orchard, and started bottling her
own syrup. The syrup was okay, but the bottle was incredible. There was a little light-activated mechanism
inside the cap; as soon as you opened the bottle, Patti warbled a little sugary-sweet
maple-syrup song.
This was absolutely perfect,
I thought. So I bought half-a-dozen bottles, and sent them out, and -
Almost no response. “Thanks for the syrup,” I got from one
or two people.
Then, over the next few years, I started getting little
messages from those same people. “Did you know that that bottle of syrup sings
a song? We just opened it, and –“
Oh yes. It took some of them two years or so to open my gift.
Merry Christmas!
