Welcome to this month’s edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes, interests, and lives? Every month a group of seven bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, and thoughts, with posts based on specific prompts. It’s been so interesting over the years to see the different ways each of us interpret the topics.

This month’s topic is Best Gifts I’ve Ever Received. I’m tweaking that a bit.

My father was an interesting gift giver. I mean, he gave interesting gifts. Well, to me anyway, I didn’t really pay attention to what other people were getting as I was a self-centered young person.

The thing about his gifts is that at first glance you were always like, “huh? what? why?” He left the “Christmas List” gifts to my mother…and he would go rogue, shopping by himself.

He even had his own wrapping paper. A GIANT roll of white paper decorated with pine boughs and holly berries he bought while they lived in Japan in the 50s. And all my life that’s the only Christmas paper I ever knew him to use…and he died in 1982. THAT’S how big the roll was. It outlived him. I think my mother must have thrown it out, or maybe the evil “stuff throwing out” men who helped (helped my a**) clean out the house after my mother died, threw it out (along with a million other wonderful things I wanted, no, no long-term resentment there). Either way…at some point it ceased to exist.

I wish I still had that paper.

Bettye the Tangent Queen.

Okay, but his gifts. They were never anything you thought you wanted…and in fact, I’d often spend some time with them being like what the heck, I don’t want to read that, do that, play that, etc. But eventually, after the shiny excitement of the other “wanted” gifts wore off, I’d eventually come around and be like oh alright, let’s give this a try. And Every Time, EVERY TIME, they were a hit!

“Island of the Blue Dolphins,” “Ring of Bright Water,” “A Little Princess,” all wonderful books I possibly would never have read had he not given them to me.

“Mason Williams Ear Show” cd (this holds up even today).

The “Invisible Horse,” anatomical model you had to put together. I was a horse crazy girl and collected Breyer horse models and had much of the Johnny West series of cowboys, cowgirls, Indians, and their horses…but he went in a different direction with The Visible Horse. And I loved it! We worked on it together, and I had that thing so long that after the glue turned yellow and stopped holding the two horse halves together, I scotch-taped it together…until the tape turned yellow and no longer held. It had a place in my room and in my heart for years.

A giant 2-sided blackboard on a swivel stand. It lived in our basement den/tv room for most of my youth, and that’s where I would practice my horse drawing. I’d draw, then ask my father, who was sitting down there watching a ball game of some sort and smoking a pipe, how it could be better. He’d come and critique it, sometimes filling in with his own sketching…and then I’d do it again. And again. And again. I feel like the horse head/neck drawings I do now are exactly the same as what my father taught me to do when I was a little girl on that blackboard. On my birthday and holidays either my mother or father would write a big “Happy ___ (whatever)” on the blackboard for me. I always loved that.

And in another era, when I got married like a crazy person, after just three weeks of meeting someone (THAT’S a story), my father gave me  a paperback copy of Julia Child’s The Art of Cooking, which I still have to this day. It’s (also) being held together with yellowed scotch tape, but that’s okay. It has been used often and I think of him every time. The “fancy breakfast crepes” that I used to make for me and Katie on Thanksgiving morning was from a recipe in that book.

We all have things we want as gifts. But sometimes the best gifts are the total surprises, the ones we didn’t know we wanted until we had them. The ones that stay with you for a long time – physically and in your heart. The ones that always remind you of the gifter.

Take a look at my friends’ blogs as well, to see their special gifts.

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own