[2021-12-14] Christmas mystery gift
Under the heading of stories from my youth, I've dipped into my list of Questions by Categories to answer the query "Best or most memorable present you ever received?"
When I was a kid, I had a habit of scrutinizing wrapped gifts to see whether I could guess what my presents were. Could this be a doll? A tea set? A colouring book and crayons?
One wrapped gift completely stumped me. Every day for weeks, I would manipulate this particular present. It felt like a bag of balls—smaller and heavier than ping pong balls, bigger and lighter than marbles. Why would my mother buy a bag of balls, I wondered.
Finally, Christmas morning arrived, and the mystery gift was unwrapped. It was, indeed, a bag of balls. Only after my mother dispatched one of my brothers to her bedroom closet to fetch the rest of the gift was the puzzle solved. It was a mini pool table. Wrapping only part of the gift was a clever trick by my mom to confuse us—or perhaps she just couldn't be bothered wrapping a huge box.
I admired my mom's ingenuity and, years later, would use her wrap-only-part-of-the-present trick on my own family.
The pool table may not have been the best present I ever received—though we did play with it a lot—but its wrapping made it one of the most memorable.
