My mother, bless her soul, was the queen of "unique" when it came to buying Christmas gifts. Each year, she would spend weeks searching for things she was certain no one possibly could already own.
And I'm pretty sure there was a good reason why they didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. Whenever I gave Mom my Christmas list, she was excellent at
tracking down even the hardest-to-find items on it. And her taste in clothing was so great, if I asked for a sweater, I knew the one she'd pick out for me would be
gorgeous.
But Mom also was in the habit of straying from the list and adding a few of her own original gift ideas…as an unexpected surprise.
And they definitely were a surprise. Believe me, there was no way I (or anyone else) could shake one of those boxes and ever guess what was inside.
Take, for example, the duck remote-control holder she bought for my husband one year. It was a stuffed vinyl Mallard that had a cloth pocket-flap attached to each side of it. You could insert a TV Guide into the flap's pockets on one side, and a remote, canned beverage and probably a side of beef into the ones on the other side. The duck was filled with something that weighed it down, like the beans in beanbags, and was supposed to sit on the arm of a chair or sofa, with the flaps hanging down over each side.
I tried not to laugh when I saw the duck perched there next to my husband. For one thing, he always used both armrests, so I doubted he'd enjoy having to share one with a stuffed duck.
“Why a duck anyway?” he asked me the next night after he’d stretched out in his recliner and accidentally hit the duck with his arm and knocked it onto the floor for the umpteenth time. He glared at it. “What does a duck have to do with holding a remote control anyway? A kangaroo would have made more sense!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But just make sure you keep that duck on your chair. When my mom drops by, you'll hurt her feelings if it's not there."
The very next morning I got up to find a gasp-worthy scene in the living
room. On the rug lay the duck, decapitated, with its innards strewn from one
end of the living room to the other.
My first thought was my
husband had committed duck-icide.
I rushed back into the bedroom to confront him. “What did you do to the duck? And what are we going to tell my mother?"
Half asleep, he opened one eye. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“The duck she bought for you! It’s lying in pieces on the rug! I don’t even
know where its head is!”
He sat up and smiled. “Really? The duck’s been mutilated? You wouldn’t kid me
about something like that, would you?”
As if on cue, one of our dogs came trotting into the room...with the duck’s
head in her teeth. I thought my husband was going to kiss her.
“You didn’t smear that duck with Alpo before you went to bed, did you?” I
narrowed my eyes at him.
He laughed. “No, the dog is just smart, that’s all.”
My mother must have had a fondness for birds, because the next Christmas she
bought me a stuffed parrot that contained some kind of a recording device that
enabled it to repeat everything it heard.
“Hello!” I said to the parrot after my mom, smiling broadly, told me to try it.
“Hello!” its squawky voice came back at me. When it spoke, its beak opened and
closed and its mechanical wings flapped.
Mom giggled and clapped her hands together. “Say something else!”
“Say something else!” the parrot repeated, to Mom’s obvious delight.
Back when I was in grade school, there was a bully named Gary who got a kick out of repeating everything I said, mocking me until I wanted to kick him. Unfortunately, the parrot immediately reminded me of Gary.
“My name is Sally,” I said.
“My name is Sally!” the annoying bird said back to me.
The minute our dog, Sabre, heard the strange, nasally voice, she started barking at it.
“Aarrff! Aarrff! Grrrrr!”
The parrot immediately responded with, “Aarrff! Aarrff! Grrrrr!”
Sabre obviously didn’t appreciate being mocked. She shot her most threatening Cujo-style growls at the parrot. It shot the same growls right back, which only served to agitate her even more.
I figured that in dog talk,
Sabre probably had been telling the parrot, “Shut up or die, bird brain!” So
when the parrot repeated it, he was telling her the same thing.
Before we knew what was happening, Sabre had the parrot in her mouth, and fake feathers went flying everywhere. Within seconds, the bird joined my husband’s duck as a member of the
decapitation club.
After witnessing the carnage, my mother pretty much stuck to our Christmas lists from then on and refrained from buying us any more bird or animal-themed gifts.
That is, until she discovered Chia Pets…
# # #
Sally Breslin is a native New Englander and an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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