{"id":33191,"date":"2024-10-16T08:00:25","date_gmt":"2024-10-16T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=33191"},"modified":"2024-10-15T08:28:12","modified_gmt":"2024-10-15T13:28:12","slug":"the-memories-of-a-gift-schtick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/16\/the-memories-of-a-gift-schtick\/","title":{"rendered":"The Memories of a Gift Schtick"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I posted &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/31\/the-gift-schtick\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\">The Gift Schtick<\/a>&#8221; in 2007; it&#8217;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 <em>geese<\/em>, and prior to that she&#8217;d liked flamingoes, so maybe I was never that close to her and got her more random than thematic gifts every year).<\/p>\n<p>For a while about ten years ago, I bought <em>Duck Dynasty<\/em> things for my aunt who passed away in 2019.  She&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>On Sunday, I came across this on the free book cart at church:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/duckcommanderdevotional.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>The <em>Duck Commander Devotional<\/em>.  It made me think of my aunt.<\/p>\n<p>You know, when I&#8217;m wandering antique malls, I&#8217;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&#8211;a single owl and a single eagle piece of wall d\u00e9cor.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t pick up the devotional, and I don&#8217;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).  <\/p>\n<p>It makes me wish I actually had more gift shticks.  They&#8217;re like abstract personal relics for loved ones.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, I did not take the devotional as they are not really my thing.<\/p>\n<p>Also, note the scorecard for the borrowed words in the blog:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Yiddish:<\/strong> 2 (schtick, tchotchke)<br \/>\n<strong>German:<\/strong> 1 (kitsch)<br \/>\n<strong>French:<\/strong> 2 (d\u00e9cor, motif)<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I posted &#8220;The Gift Schtick&#8221; in 2007; it&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33192,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33191\/revisions\/33192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}