Staff Stories: Memorable Gifts

The December Readers Write on “Luxuries” prompted a few of us on the Sun staff to share stories about our own surprising and memorable gifts. Unwrap those below.

Perhaps my dad thought I’d appreciate the gift more once I was a parent myself, because he waited until I was thirty to give me the digitized compilation of our family’s Super 8 films, its homemade cover titled Persistence & Sweetness: Early, Good Years Still Remembered. There are silent movies of my sister and me shirtless and chasing frogs in our backyard, playing cards, and eating popcorn in our pajamas. But it’s the footage of my mom, hamming it up for the camera, that makes the gift so memorable. In one film she’s slalom waterskiing, gracefully jumping waves with ease. In another she flirts with my dad, the two of them so in love. In the most striking film she spins in a light cotton dress on my grandparents’ Florida lawn, then grabs her father by the hand, and they break into a waltz together in the sunlight.

My mother died from cancer when she was thirty-one years old. I was only six. Until my dad gave these films to me, I just had photo albums and the memories of others to form a picture of her. I so desperately wanted to know her, to remember her.

I’ve always appreciated photographs and have shied away from video, but these priceless home movies have given me a more alive, complete picture of my mom.

—Rachel J. Elliott, Editorial Associate and Photo Editor

During the isolation of early COVID lockdown in 2020 I had a milestone birthday. When I was finally able to visit my parents, my mom gave me the present she’d been holding on to for almost a year: a collection of family recipes she’d gathered from relatives and friends and made into a scrapbook decorated with old photos, cards, and mementos. I’m about as sentimental as they come, so for me, a book full of index cards in my nana’s handwriting and recipes from childhood neighbors I haven’t seen in decades is the best kind of gift.

—Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

My brother and I were each permitted to open a single present from our gran every Christmas Eve. Unlike our Christmas tree, where gifts appeared only on Christmas morning, Gran’s tree gathered wrapped packages for what felt like a whole month in advance, though it was probably closer to a week or two. Living next door gave us ample opportunities to investigate and make our pick. While many gifts betrayed their contents—a wrapped action figure is unmistakable—one year a pair of mysterious packages grabbed our attention: rectangular, roughly the size of cracker boxes, and silent when shaken. Gran tried to direct our attention to other gifts, but we would not be deterred, so Christmas Eve found us furiously tearing into . . . matching pairs of socks. Neither of us were mature enough to hide our disappointment, so, to my shame, the rule was broken that year and we each opened another. I don’t remember what the follow-ups were, but I have never forgotten those socks.

—Derek Askey, Associate Editor

For Christmas 1980, when I was eleven, I received the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. My parents and older brother obliged to play it with me. I was the Dungeon Master, and they were the ill-fated adventuring party who died at the hands of half a dozen goblins some seventy feet into the first dungeon. They never played again. I moved on to Advanced D&D, and my friends and I experienced many silly—and thankfully more successful—adventures until we all got our driver’s licenses.

—Andrew Snee, Senior Editor