The Strangest Christmas Gift

I’ve tried all week to come up with a list for the blog assignment. Sure, I make lists. I have a grocery list in the little notebook I carry in my purse: milk, toilet tissue.... I have a list of tasks to accomplish in my day planner: write another scene for my next book, critique chapters for my writers’ groups… Yeah, I make lists, but they’re about as entertaining as—well—reading a grocery list.  So what have I done that would make a list anybody would want to read?

Nothing.

For some reason, though, my thoughts kept returning to a Christmas party I attended while I was working for the Fortune 500 corporation.  I was seated at table with the vice president of the division, his wife, my supervisor and her husband, who was a factory manager, and a department manager and his wife. I was the lowest person on the totem pole at that table, there only because my job had high visibility in the division and in the community.

Needless to say, I sat quietly and listened to the conversation—something I’m quite good at because I’m a devoted introvert. Somehow, that conversation drifted to listing the strangest Christmas gifts we’d ever received. I can’t remember all the gifts that were added to the list. I was just trying to keep a low profile because, really, what could I say that would top a Porche?

But then all faces turned to me.

And I just blurted out the gift my husband had given me last Christmas.

“An atlatl and three spears.”

I won.