About my gift...
I'm a fan of this artist named Walton Ford. He does these really subversive Audubon-like natural history paintings. The originals are huge. Even if I could afford one, I wouldn't know where to put it. I would need an awfully big apartment/house/trailer/RV, LOL. His originals start in the 10s of thousands of dollars and go up to $1M+ pretty quick last I checked. Ford's official prints sell for thousands of dollars. I collect anything of his I can afford, which at this point amounts to promo cards for his gallery showings. His promo cards are not expensive, but they're about as rare as hen's teeth. So I buy them whenever I find them.
My bro works at a print shop. He found a high-res image of one of Walton Ford's paintings, printed it out, and framed it for me himself. This is an "unofficial" print. It's a one-of-one. Laws were no doubt broken to create it. You could say it's unfair that it even exists, that Mr. Ford should have benefited more financially from my interest in his work. Whatever. It's an object I can't sell that means a lot to me, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
Here it is:
About the gifts I gave...
My siblings are always saying they want gold bars for Christmas.
So I got them some this year!!
I ordered 3g of "scrap gold," and that's what they sent me.
I taped one of them to the inside of an empty box. Then I put that box inside another box and wrapped it.
I threw the second one in a 1ga bag of dirt. Stuck that in a box and wrapped it. It felt weird throwing a tiny chunk of gold in a bag of dirt!!
I stuck the last one in about 15 layers of foam and wrapped it up like it was a sweater.
I should have taken pictures of what they looked like after I wrapped them. They looked like three very different gifts!
My brothers thought I got them empty boxes and dirt. They eventually found the gold, LOL. The brother who got the bag of dirt used a pan and a colander to find it. I thought he would bust out his gold pan!!
Gold is a really neat material. "Gold fever" is a real thing. There's more to it than greed. Looking at gold makes people feel some type of way, which I've always found interesting. Unlike pretty much everything else on Earth, gold doesn't oxidize. It doesn't react with anything. It's this weird constant, an anomaly in the force.
Watching them unwrap - and then discover/find - their gifts was the best part. :-P