The Gift that Makes you Want to Stop Giving

If you are capable of creating any art or craft type item, you have probably gifted your friends and family with them from time to time. It happens. I have always taken pride in giving handmade gifts for about 60% of all gifts that go out of my house. I enjoy it. For the most part, I don't even care what the person recieving it thinks about it. If it made me happy making it and I was satisfied with the item when completed, it makes me happy.

Now, if the person actually likes the item enough to hang onto it and tell others about it. You feel sort of like you won the lottery. It sort of lights a candle in your soul that warms you for years and feeds your creativity. I have encountered people incapable of appreiating a handmade gift -- not to mention any names but she goes by the initials MOM -- and you just quit making them gifts. If they prefer a $10 gift certificate to Walmart, I save give it to them.

But over the last few years I've discovered something that actually has the ability to make me want to stop making gifts for people. Receiving them back after the recepient dies.

This first time this happended to me was with my grandmother-in-law. She was a very sweet woman I knew about 5 years. She lived across the country, so I only met her 4 or 5 times. For her 90th birthday, I organized the making of a family quilt for her. Her younger daughter, my husbands mother, died almost 20 years ago. So I got all 5 of her children to decorate 5 fabric blocks any way they wanted. I provided the fabric squares and several pages of directions and options for them. When the squares were returned I sewed them together and quilted them. We gave it to her for her birthday and she cried she loved it so much. It stayed on her bed until she died and they displayed it at the funeral home. Then as we were leaving to head home they gave it to me.

I barely knew the woman. I don't care for a quilt with my in-laws personal gifts/thoughts for their grandmother sewn into them. I've politely tried to give it to each of the other family members and no one wants it. But it's not the kind of thing you feel free to throw away. So every time it starts getting cold and I'm digging through my linen chest for a blanket I have to bypass the quilt I'll never use, don't want, and can't give or throw away.

Now, that's bad enough. But much worse is coming.

My sister that was buried this week was a devote lover of handmade gifts. She was also born on Dec 20th, so her birthday was always overlooked. I made it my goal in life to ensure she always got a birthday and Christmas gift in December . . . and they were usually handmade. She loved angels and cuddeling up on the couch and watching old movies covered up in a blanket.

I made my first, and only, pieced quilt for her for her birthday one year. I made it in different blue tones (because her house was all done in blue) and each square was an angle. It was just barely lap size, but she loved it. She said she used it so much for the first year it started coming apart and she took it to Mrs. Campbell to repair it for her.

I know she loved it and I loved her like crazy. Right after I found out she died I emailed my other sister, who was in charge of storing her stuff, and asked her to bring the blanket down so we could put it in the casket for Becky. I knew she'd want it with her and it did offer me some comfort to think of a little part of me going to rest with her.

My sister didn't get the email in time. She called me later, after it was already stored in storage, and offered to call someone who would go somewhere and dig it out of somebox and give it to someone else who would bring it down to us somehow and . . . something else, I forgot.

It wasn't really that important. It was more for me than Becky; really, it's not like she's going to get cold or cuddle up with a good book. What's more, I'm a big girl and I can get over it. Until my sister said something that made my blood run cold . . . "I put it aside with some other things I knew you'd want."

The thought of seeing something so connected to Becky, something that bespoke so clearly of the love we shared, on a dialy baises scares the SHIT out of me. Just thinking about it has me crying so hard I can barely see that keyboard -- not that it seems to be affecting my spelling or anything. I never could spell.

The more I think about it, the more things I remember making her over the years. Now, I'm faced with the very real possiblity of getting them all back. It's like the scarriest case of "Indian giving" I've ever heard of.

Now, a huge part of me realizes that 2, 5, maybe 20 years down the road. I will be able to hold that blanket and feel good thoughts and remember only love. But right now, I'm looking forward to receiving it like I would waling into a giant mouse trap. Come on the cheese!

With my luck, my sister will read this and think she did (or is going to do) something wrong)and she hasn't. In fact, I will love and cherish everying she saw fit to sit aside for me. Every memory of Becky. It will just hurt. And it damb sure will make me think about giving any more handmade gifts to people I love.