The Memories of a Gift Schtick

I posted “The Gift Schtick” in 2007; it’s an essay about how you can come into a gift-giving theme for a person based on a particular brand, icon, or image that the recipient likes. For example, my friend the Elvis impersonator gets some Elvis kitsch whenever I send him a gift. My one aunt got chicken things (although the essay says she liked geese, and prior to that she’d liked flamingoes, so maybe I was never that close to her and got her more random than thematic gifts every year).

For a while about ten years ago, I bought Duck Dynasty things for my aunt who passed away in 2019. She’d mentioned she hated the show, so I gave her obnoxious things I came across such as a beach towel and a shotglass set to supplement sincere gifts.

On Sunday, I came across this on the free book cart at church:

The Duck Commander Devotional. It made me think of my aunt.

You know, when I’m wandering antique malls, I’m often drawn to eagle or owl tchotchkes as my mother collected them, so they were safe gifting. I only have a couple such items from her as inheritances–a single owl and a single eagle piece of wall décor.

I didn’t pick up the devotional, and I don’t buy the eagles or owls, but the gift schtick association helps me to remember people with whom the individual motifs are associated. Whenever I see a Father Christmas Santa, I think of a family friend we see infrequently and for whom we are not supposed to buy Christmas gifts (but we do).

It makes me wish I actually had more gift shticks. They’re like abstract personal relics for loved ones.

At any rate, I did not take the devotional as they are not really my thing.

Also, note the scorecard for the borrowed words in the blog:

Yiddish: 2 (schtick, tchotchke)
German: 1 (kitsch)
French: 2 (décor, motif)

I checked it out because I thought kitsch might be a third Yiddish borrowing, but it was not. Then I threw in the French borrowed words just to have a third language to list. Because blogging is about the game inside the game.

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