The 12 Days of Donkmas - The Surprise Gift

Day 5 - The Surprise Gift

My dad must have been obsessed with the movie A Christmas Story, because it seemed like every year he had a “special gift” that he waited until the end of the morning to give me, much like Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB Gun.  Now it’s really touching, I know, for a father to have that kind of love for a son, and I am truly blessed to have had a dad like him.  But the problem was quality control.  My pops seemed driven to give me a surprise gift regardless of small details such as whether it was something I “actually wanted.”

Um, Thanks for the Sprinkler Dad

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Sometimes he hit a grandslam homerun, like the time he hid a BMX bike on the back porch.  But other times it was just plain awkward.  For example, one year he had me follow a trail of string all the way out to our carport, where I found a weight set, which would have been awesome…had I asked for one.  Or another year when he hid a .22 caliber rifle that he had refurbished.  It was beautiful and I was touched, but I had never shot a gun in my life up to that point and had never shown any interest in doing so.  The most uncomfortable part was that I felt obligated to fake unmitigated glee at finding these gifts.  To do otherwise would have been to risk hurting my dad’s feelings after he went through all of that trouble.  And while I may not have been the perfect son, I wasn’t a total dick. 

Oddly enough, throughout the years, even as those weights sat gathering dust in the corner, the gun growing rusty with disuse, they’d make me grin as I gazed at them and remembered how psyched my dad was to give them to me.  Come to think of it, maybe they weren’t such bad gifts afterall.