The Weird Gift

The first gift I can recall Vanessa and Rachel giving me wasn’t really FROM them, Mac had obviously purchased the lovely emerald stud earrings and the girls had signed the card. It was a special occasion (my 30^th birthday), and the pretty earrings were much appreciated. The children were excited about the gift and their father beamed with pride, and that’s when I broke down and did something I swore I would NEVER do – I got my ears pierced. Neither Mac nor the girls had taken into consideration the fact that my earlobes were hole-less and, although I loved the emerald studs, I would have preferred to keep my lobes intact!  However, I “bit the bullet”, got my ears pierced, and wore those little birthday earrings for many years. They were the perfect gift.

A few years later we had moved into our new house at Belmont. Christmas was coming, and the children wanted to shop for presents  on their own. Mac and I, figuring they were old enough to choose gifts without parental guidance, sent them to Local Color Boutique with instructions to charge their purchases. Charge accounts were very common for us “back in the day”; we had monthly accounts at the grocery stores on Bequia as well as on the mainland, plus we put outings to places such as De Reef, Sunny Caribbee and the Frangipani on monthly tabs.

Local Color was owned by our friends Joan and Elaine, a nice boutique offering terrific (and often very funny) imported t-shirts, dresses, wraps and bathing suits. There was also a display of Josette Norris’s beautiful hand-crafted silver jewellery, along with other unique local arts and crafts. I shopped at Local Color often for gifts – they really did have great stuff for any occasion – and forgot about Vanessa and Rachel’s shopping excursion until I went to pay the bill shortly before Christmas.

Wow! It was pretty steep!  I figured the large price-tag meant that I would be getting one of Josette’s lovely pieces of jewellery. I already owned some of her talented work, how clever of my girls to choose something they knew I would cherish! I paid the hefty boutique bill, and didn’t give it another thought until I opened my gift from Vanessa and Rachel on Christmas Day.

The girls watched anxiously as I opened the present. More than once they urged me to be careful because the gift was fragile, and from its size and heft of the I knew it couldn’t possibly be jewellery.  I opened the box and stared with astonishment at an egg perched on a fancy pedestal, a HUGE egg on a pedestal, and realized that my children had given me the ostrich egg that I had laughed at so often whenever I passed through Local Color. I had teased the owners many times about it; after all, who would be weird enough buy a giant ostrich egg on a pedestal at boutique in the Caribbean? Vanessa and Rachel, THAT’S who – they loved the fancy egg and had bought it just for me.

That ostrich egg cost me a whopping $700 EC, and it sat on top of our piano until someone mercifully knocked it off its fancy pedestal. It broke into smithereens like Humpty Dumpty, and no effort was made  by anyone in the household to glue it back together. I still have the pedestal, now rusted with age, as a reminder of the weirdest Christmas gift I ever received, and that young children DO need parental guidance when shopping for gifts! As for the owners of the boutique, the last laugh was obviously on ME!