Our son’s invited to a birthday party in a couple of weeks, and I’m wondering how we could ever come up with a birthday gift as cool as the one this boy got our son for his birthday. In our experience, the drill for boys’ birthday parties is spend around $10 on a Bionicle or baseball cards or, in the case of my son’s most recent birthday, Yu-Gi-Oh cards. This particular boy, who comes from a thoughtfully thrifty homeschooling family, is supposed to be responsible for buying his own gifts. But our invitation didn’t give him much lead time, and Christmas was coming up, so he was short on funds. What to do? Well, this innovative little guy dipped into his prodigious Lego collection and built a carefully crafted spaceship that he presented to Ben at the party.
It was easily the coolest gift at the party. I was struck by the “friendship bread” nature of the gift. Sharing some of what you have, which then gets made into something else. I guess the obvious thing for our son to do is build his own Lego creation for this boy’s party. Another possibility is a Robo-Bug kit we recently uncovered during some “clutter mining” around the house. I did, in fact, pay about $10 for it while working a library book fair a couple of years ago, thinking we would use it as a birthday gift for someone. But we never did, and I guess I forgot about it. Ben was the one who unearthed it, from a box in a seldom-used closet, and he thinks it would be perfect for this boy. So we’ve got a bit of time to work out the details, as Ben is now, this year, also supposed to be buying or making his own gifts.
In the meantime, I’m amused by the prospect of finding myself trying to “keep up with the Joneses” in terms of thrift and creativity rather than materialism. It’s a good problem to have.
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