You Want What for Christmas?

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Christmas gift giving at my house can be a minefield. Because my husband has always stepped to the music of a “different drummer—however measured or far away,” as Thoreau enjoined almost 200 years ago, it’s almost impossible to find the perfect gift for him. A long consecutive string of gift “failures” has taught me to NEVER buy a tie or any item resembling clothes, for that matter. In my husband’s eyes, a “gift” is defined as something his highly eccentric imagination demands, but he can’t justify spending the money on. That’s my job.

Every year, a couple of weeks before Christmas, my husband now gives family members a list of items he deems would make appropriate gifts. Once, he wanted a violin—a reasonable request since he was first chair in the high school orchestra and had dreams of joining the Murray Symphony. Between our purchase and the actual opening of the gift, however, he became enamored of building medieval armor. And thus, the lonely violin sits on my husband’s closet shelf–hoping for its owner to someday notice its existence. Another year, he wanted in-line skates. He had visions of racing down the streets alongside his teenage children. In actual fact, he never got closer than a block or two behind them. Demoralizing. Now the skates are permanent residents underneath our bed.

At the top of his list one year was an anvil. Really. An anvil. You know—a metalworking tool “consisting of a large block of metal, with a flattened top surface, upon which another object is struck” (thank you, Google). In those days, my husband was deep into sword building. Authentic broadswords. I’m guessing that in his head, he could see himself swathed in a leather apron, standing at a forge, his muscles bulging as he strikes a mighty hammer’s blow against the glowing blade of red-hot steel.

It had never occurred to me you could actually buy such a thing as an anvil. Naively, I thought every blacksmith made his own. Moving down to the next item on his list, a gift card to Lowe’s seemed a far more reasonable choice. But fate intervened. Who knew? I ran across an anvil in the want ads. On sale, no less.  (In my own defense, I’d like to point out that no one I know personally has ever bought an anvil. Spoiler alert: they are not cheap!) It took three of my sons to lift it up the stairs and into the house. We set it behind the Christmas tree and wrapped it in situ, as none of us had the heart to try to move it anywhere else.

Christmas morning, we handed out gifts, careful to leave the large package behind the tree for last. “I think that’s yours,” I casually mentioned to my husband when every other gift had been distributed. He loves presents, so he flashed me a delighted grin and bent over to pick it up. Nothing happened. It didn’t move an inch, no matter how he tugged. Turning toward us, he narrowed his eyes and stared at each of us in turn. We all managed to look innocent—except the two-year-old who hadn’t looked innocent since birth. Son #1 laughed good-naturedly and joined his dad behind the tree. The two of them relocated the gift so that my husband could open it. A genuine anvil. HE WAS THRILLED. Best present ever!

Except for the year we gave him 100 pounds of scrap steel. That was a winner, too.