Walking stories

Confessions of a gift-giver

December 12, 2023

Chanukah’s already arrived, Christmas is little more than a week away, and Greenberg’s been his usual multitasking self, snarfing up discarded bits of pizza crust and  contemplating those festive occasions as we make our way around the neighborhood. 

As for me, I’ve been worried about my bowls.

Loyal readers may remember this account of my early struggles with ceramics. Every story should have a happy ending, especially a holiday tale.  But if you want a feel-good parable about misery becoming euphoria,  you’ll have to read “A Christmas Carol.” And if you want a feel-good story about the ironies of love and gift-giving, you’ll have to read “The Gift of the Magi.”   If you want sparkling visions of sugar-plum fairies … oh the hell with it. 

At the start of my first term in City College ceramics class, our teacher/mentor/coach/mood-enhancer Tom prophesied that each of us would turn out bowls, mugs and vases that could become Christmas presents for lucky recipients. He demonstrated by throwing bowls big enough for popcorn, for salad, for turkey stuffing, to hold one’s knitting or in which to soak one’s aching feet.  I knew from the start that big was out of the question.  But I pictured myself surrounded by stacks of shiny ceramics objects, smooth and glazed, just beckoning to be filled with nuts and designer chocolate candies. 

 Since the first week of my first term, I watched while students around me began turning out fanciful pitchers, platters, colanders and cat-centric whimsies.  After a year-and-a-half – three terms – I have progressed to making something that’s roughly bowl-shaped.   Perhaps bowl-like is a better description.  But if my progress has been painfully slow, I –  like Judah Maccabee, the never-say-die hero of Chanukah or perhaps like some crazily cheerful Christmas elf – haven’t given up on my dreams.   

So  beginning around October, when many people in the class were making ceramic pumpkins with friendly-monster faces, and through Thanksgiving, when many people in the class were making bowls for serving up the sweet potatoes, I started in on my masterpiece project:  A personalized bowl for each of my grandchildren and their parents, 11 bowls in all. 

 They didn’t have to be identical, in color or in size.  In fact, I would make the variety of sizes roughly in proportion to the ages of the intended recipients.  I worried about traditional holiday scenes of adorable children in their flannel pajamas, delightedly ripping open packages of live puppies, Barbies, bicycles and plastic rifles.  I knew in my sensible head that bowls might not be on anyone’s holiday wish list, but it would give me pleasure to present them all with something that I had created with my own paws.  Besides, these were going to be nice.

The oldest grandchildren have been on this earth for 11 years, during which I have spent many waking hours on this computer, looking for birthday and Chanukah presents.  I am an eager shopper who loves nothing much better than rummaging through merchandise in a store, feeling its heft, its quality, assessing whether it will fit and whether it will please.  On-line shopping has robbed me of that pleasure.

I hate falling down the rabbit hole of holiday shopping via computer, choosing things that I am seeing from afar, having little idea of whether it is something that’s going to last (sorry, that’s the lesson my Depression-era parents taught me) or give pleasure.   I try to think about what’s going to be treasured … and invariably, the kids are more excited by the latest plastic robot that gives off rays and comes with a stick that they can use to hit each other.  I have tried buying tickets to experiences, but this is winter and kids get colds and those plans sometimes have been thwarted.  

So it was going to be bowls.  I etched into wet clay the names of the three San Francisco grandkids and their parents.  The writing was higgledy-piggledy but that was part of their charm, I thought.  I would use a different technique on the other bowls, in which I glazed the names into the insides of bowls already turned into bisque.  ( I am a level-headed woman, and I am not in tears.  But although I describe the process, do not, I repeat, DO NOT, use this account as a DIY guide for your own ceramics projects.)

When the first five bowls were pulled from the kiln, I sighed, and thought about how I would glaze them again.    Then the other six bowls came out, and they were - well, to put it in positive terms – even worse.  The colors were muddy, the surfaces grainy, the letters unclear.   The best thing that could be said about them is that a small child hauling one from table to sink would get a good physical work-out. 

My heart began sinking in mid-November, as my locker became crowded with towering stacks of bowls  My intention was to use the best of them for the project.  It soon became clear that “best of them” was a misleading thought,   “least awful” being more honest.   

Chanukah started, and I still hadn’t delivered anything  to the San Francisco family.    The two other families – one in Iowa and one in Brooklyn – have Christmas trees, so the deadline for present-delivery is a little fuzzier.  The holiday spirit was coming down full force, perhaps even stronger than usual this year in some kind of attempt to push away the horrors of war in the world around us.

As I walked with Greenberg, my thoughts had a vigorous debate with each other:

My desperate please-like-me self said it’d be easy to go online and find some kid-pleasing  plastic gift, for which I would pay with plastic.   And then I would wonder – as I do every year – whether it had arrived, and then I would ask whether the intended recipient had received it, and would  feel like the greedy-for-gratitude adult that I am. 

 My puritan self – my husband says I’m the only Ashkenazic Jew who left the shtetl to come  over on the Mayflower – said it would be good to demonstrate to the kids that even grown-ups mess up sometimes, that not everything planned turns out perfect, and that these gifts were made with love.  Walk with confidence  and don’t apologize.  Stand by my bowls.  

Last night, I chose  a modified version of the latter option.  I bought the makings of ice cream sundaes – hot fudge sauce, colored sprinkles, shredded coconut, whipped cream (in aerosol can), shelled walnuts — and packed each of those makings with one of the bowls, along with a tub of ice cream.    I dropped it all off at the house of the San Francisco grandkids, who were almost home but not quite when I got there.

Which may have been a blessing.    I didn’t see their faces when they realized that the lump of coal in their stockings was a blobby globby bowl from Granny Leah.

I still have six bowls to mail to the Midwest and to New York.   My husband, who, as a regular at the post office, is usually the family mail clerk, picked up one of the bowls, felt its heft, and declared  I should take care of the mailing.  Also,  considering the cost of shipping, he asked me to specify they be shipped  by land and not by air.   I am picturing a team of horses dragging my bowls over the Rockies and across the Mississippi River.  As of this writing, I am not sure that they will get to their recipients in time for Memorial Day.

We’ll light the menorah in a few minutes.  It’s getting dark, almost time for the early evening walk, when Greenberg and I look up at the holiday lights and admire the trees twinkling in front windows.  Happily, he does not need a holiday gift.      

At the beginning of ceramics class, Tom told us that pottery lasts for thousands of years.   Maybe in time the grandkids will forgive me.