I’m sure you’ve all gotten a gift for Christmas that’s odd. Bunny pajamas, a shirt you’d never wear, a CD in a musical style completely outside your listening habits, 6 loaves of fruitcake. These kinds of things find their way under your tree too, right?
My girlfriend and I sat in on our first gift exchange of the year and I got a very strange gift: the World’s Greatest Flashlight. It gave us quite a few laughs that night and the following day, joking about its 15-million-candlepower beam burning holes through walls. The idea of the flashlight coming with a PG&E substation in order to recharge it cracked me up. The gift giver and I laughed harder than we had on my entire visit. That’s everything good about gift giving and made it worthwhile.
Now I’m back home and trying to find a spot for my monster of a flashlight. When you think ‘flashlight,’ something fairly small and portable pops into your head. This thing looks like a small telescope. The description on the box mentions brining the flashlight along on your “woodland forays” and “nocturnal rambles.” Those phrasings and the carrying strap that comes with it only makes its size even more absurd. As nice and expensive a gift as it is, now that the laughter has worn off, I have no idea what to do with it. Maybe I’ll keep it as a white elephant gift. I didn’t ask for the receipt because it would have killed the laughter we had going, but maybe I should have.
This is the strangest Christmas gift I can remember (though also the funniest). What’s your strangest gift? Do tell, but maybe you should wait a few days. Keep your eyes open on Monday because you never know what you’re going to get this year.