Did you ever get one of those gifts that just humbled you? Every year my SO's family showers us with and embarrassment of riches. None of his family is well off, but many of the gifts are made, or collected over the previous year, and all have a great deal of thought put into them - there are no throw away gifts. More importantly, they shower use with so much love that it aches and it never fails that I get that twinkly feeling in my nose that tells me I can either break out in the ugly cry-to-joy or distract myself to avoid a scene.
So we got all these lovely gifts, and just when we're all buried under gifts and wrapping paper, taking in all the wonderful things we've been given, my SO's dad tells us they have another gift for us, but since it couldn't be wrapped we have to come into the kitchen to choose. There in the kitchen are these two tables in the room. Turns out the SO's dad went out, collected old oak wood from the bush, and hewed it down into legs, and bottom shelf and base, then ordered in large ceramic tiles for the tops. He wanted us to choose the top we wanted, since he had made a pair of each. The grain is so beautiful. Looking at them you can just instantly tell that they will last for ever. The fact that he turned old dead trees (the SO's grandmother tells us the wood was laying where he found it for at least 10 years) into something so sturdy, solid and beautiful, and that he presented them to us so humbly and unassumingly, was just one of those moments. He has the skill, the craftsmanship, to make something that could sell in stores for hundreds of dollars, but he presented them as "just" something he'd made. It was so sweet and heartbreaking.
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Topic: What did Santa get you? (Read 14694 times)