It's a "Worst Xmas gift", but yet, still one of my fondest Christmas gifts.
1993 (17 years old)
In 1992, my senior year of high school, my parents opened a small rib and chicken fast food shop in the college town (DeKalb, IL) where my sister (two grades ahead of me) went to college (NIU). We lived in Chicago about 1hr 15min away, but rented an apartment above the shop. The shop struggled, but was able to keep pace with costs during the school year. Summer break 1993, was a different story. Business was slllllloooooooooowwww. We decided to shut down over the 4th of July for a mini break. Well over the 4-5 days we were away from DeKalb, there was a storm that knocked out the power, causing our food product to spoil (side note: cleaning hundreds of pounds of spoiled pork and chicken smelled like death itself!). The shop never recovered. I ended up getting into college (Illinois) in another town(Urbana-Champaign) in the fall. However, we were in such financial trouble, that my parents could only afford to send one of us Fall '93 and chose me (my sister was not happy). The shop carried through the fall semester, but ultimately, we liquidated after semester's end. My dad had taken a 'buyout' from IBM...to avoid a no-money layoff in '92 and my mom was full time into the shop Crippled with debt and no real career-path jobs in the near future Christmas 1993 was going to be "sparse" when it came to presents.
I was under no allusions that I was going to get expensive presents that year. Heck, I didn't expect anything at all. Yet Christmas morning, there were several (at least two that I remember) oddly heavy, bread loaf sized presents for me. I don't even know if I asked for anything, but there they were. I opened one and mostly recognized what it was, yet it still looked odd. In my hand, was one of the pieces of firewood that we used in the rib smoker, but it had a doll sized army camo jacket wrapped around it and a helmet on top. Tapped to the front of it was an index card with the words "I am G.I. Log!" There was another one similarly gussied up, but with a different theme that I cant vividly remember (I think it was "Teenage Mutant Ninja Log"). Puzzled, I turned to my mom.
Well it turns out that she had overheard me once singing the "Log! Log! Log!" song from "Ren and Stimpy" and thought it would be cool to actually give me a log as a toy. I thought it was a really dumb idea at the time; one in a long line of 'mom jokes' that she liked to play. However, in retrospect, it's one of my more cherished memories. She didn't have much that she could have done then, but she at least paid attention to the things I was into. So getting a piece of firewood, particularly when you don't have a wood burning fireplace, is a *terrible* Christmas gift. But I can never be mad at the thought that went behind it. Cheers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fQGPZTECYs
