Gift Hunt, Part 3

I found Grandma this ugly little white Christmas house candle thing at Pottery Barn so she can enjoy the sight of a house on fire melting into an amorphous waxy glob. Now, the Pottery Barn catalog suggests buying an entire village worth of house candles and making a flammable tableau out of them, but since God has seen fit to give me a job that only pays eight dollars an hour, Grandma's only gonna get a single house to burn down.

Speaking of God, I've decided to completely repudiate God this Christmas and turn this into a secular holiday. I was going to write, "All I want is for my friends to return my damn phone calls and to not spend every waking moment of the day in constant tongue pain," but just as I was typing the previous sentence, my cell phone started vibrating and Sarah called. Ha, ha, very funny, God. I'm still pissed about the canker sore, though.

Anyway, Grandma's gonna like her new candle, primarily because her disposition is to at least tolerate anything she gets. There's already precedent for this: freshman year of college, I gave Grandma a teddy bear candle because if there's anything sicker than burning down someone's home (and, yes, I know that only last week, I advocated burning down an entire apartment building), it's setting a teddy bear aflame. Grandma now puts that teddy bear under her Christmas tree every year, although I doubt she'll ever use it for its intended purpose. Even with the worst gift for Grandma, the book She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb, her reaction was mild confusion, which dissipated when I explained to her that it was "an Oprah book." (Oprah makes everything better.... Bitch.)

So now the only person left to shop for is Anne. I went to Kate's Paperie last night with the idea of maybe buying her some stationery. It seemed like a good idea when I checked it out online, but face-to-face with the stationery in the store, I realized that I'd just be giving her paper, and the gift-worthiness of stationery dropped like a paperweight. Even the fact that this particular paper was made by "the preferred stationer of the Belgian royal family" could redeem the gift idea, so now I'm back to square one.

Maybe she'd like a candle from Pottery Barn.