Gift 1

Once I made up some little spray bottles of air freshener. I got the recipe from one of my favourite TV series, where two skilled cleaners, Kim and Aggie, would do a fairy godmother transformation on health-hazard-level messy houses every week. Aggie wasn’t keen on the usual aerosol products, so she recommended mixing a bit of bicarb, water, a few drops of lavender oil (all shook up) and ready to spray.

I gave one to my neighbour and one to her regular Bolivian visitor. Just random goodwill. I like giving people little gifts. I don’t do it to curry favour, it’s just my thing.

Anyway, far from currying favour, it curried disfavour. Her Bolivian friend, who’d been 20 years in the UK and still couldn’t speak English, phoned my Spanish-speaking neighbour and said I couldn’t be trusted. Turns out she drank the air freshener, it made her ill, and so she said I’d tried to poison her.

Gift 2

I collect water from Holy Wells and package them up as little gifts with a leaflet inside about the legend of the well or the story of the Saint linked to it. I decant the water into tiny spell bottles and label them. (Not my name for them, btw, they’re marketed as ‘spell bottles’.) I’m all for reason and rationality, but I like the idea of miracles and love reading legends of saints. Hagiographies - why not? I’m a hag.

I met a woman by chance who was keen on that sort of thing too, so I gave her one of the little packets. She looked genuinely pleased. I’d already given a couple away in the same random way. Those two recipients looked at me like it was a bit odd. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, sort of thing, maybe. I’m not Greek though:)

Some time before this, I’d got involved with a new social group. They seemed ok, but they went, overnight, from being naturally friendly with me to looking at me like I was the devil incarnate. Turns out one of the group had been spreading malicious rumours about me, her idea of fun. Mud sticks. My character was assassinated, and disappointingly, everyone in the group was only too ready to believe it. The stories got back to the woman I’d given the little gift to, and the act of me giving it was from then on loaded with sinister meaning, as was the object itself.

Gift 3

A friend gave me a yeasty culture in a little bottle as the starter for the German Friendship cake. (Hermann Teig - a living sourdough culture passed between friends) I followed the recipe she’d written down, and the cake came out great. It had a unique taste, and I wanted to make it again, but I’d used up all the culture instead of keeping half.

Next time I saw my friend, I told her I loved it and asked if she had any more. She didn’t, but she said the last batch she’d given to her new neighbour as a friendly gesture, but then her longstanding neighbours told her the new neighbour was spreading rumours about how she’d given her some witch concoction, which she thought could poison her and had had to flush it down the drain.

When you pass around the Christmas gifts.

You just never know how they’ll be recieved

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