A Couple of Memorable Gifts

I have a couple of memorable gifts. The first is a Christmas quilt made by hand by my Grandma before I was born.

Seen here being commandeered by the cat.

She's made one for all of my siblings too, as well as matching stockings.

It's a family tradition that we put our quilts on our beds for the month of December and curl up with them for Christmas morning, so I have many memories of opening stockings with it draped around my shoulders or, as I grew older, smirking with my sisters while my Dad opened presents from "Santa" that were the very specific things only he would've known to buy himself, hmmmm....

The second one is much more recent, but needs two points of context. For my time as an adult I've been used to a) not having any hope of financial assistance from my family, though maybe a food care package from my sisters if things got really dire, and b) until about a year ago, having my significant other's family intensely dislike me.

A couple of months ago I had to do some sudden repairs on my car and my savings got tied up and unavailable, until at one point I had $3 in my account. Luckily I had some bonds I could cash in, and I used some of the money to go visit my boyfriend as a way to help me de-stress.

While I was there, his mom approached me and let me know she wanted to help; completely unused to this sort of thing, I half-heartedly objected several times before gratefully accepting, then stared at the folded check on the desk like it was an alien. I decided that, hey, at least that would cover my gas there and back... and then opened it up and almost fell out of my chair. It wasn't the money itself that was memorable, but instead the relief it gave me from stressing out about bills, and the feeling of (please read this in the voice of a beauty pageant queen) "you like me, you really like me!"


(As an aside that I just think is amusing, when I wandered up to my boyfriend wide-eyed and told him about it, he immediately apologized that I might've felt embarrassed; when I got home and told my sister about it she was surprised and made as big of a deal out of it as I had. Different upbringings, I guess...)