Secret Santa Can Suck It: My Gift
The matches for our Secret Santa Can Suck It exchange have been made and sent to their assignees. After everyone posts about their “gift,” I’ll list all of the entries to peruse. To kick things off, here’s mine.
My giftee is Sisifo. She is a stay-at-home mom, which means that she would probably kill for some “alone time” to relax and read a good book. My gift is to turn a room in her house into her own personal library (if she doesn’t have a room to spare, we’ll build on an addition; having an unlimited imaginary budget is nice).
We’ll start by having a cabinetmaker come in and line the walls with coffin-shaped bookcases. Then we’ll add a few other gothy touches like a coffin couch and bat pendant lamp. We’ll fill in the rest of the decor with an antique Victorian desk and chair, vintage botanical prints depicting poisonous plants, and a few exotic details like a luxurious Oriental rug and some Asian sculpture.
And now to the books. We’ll stuff the shelves with the collections of spooky writers both classic and modern, from Edgar Allan Poe to Neil Gaiman. Since our budget is quite large, many of these will be signed first editions. We’ll throw in a few unusual volumes just for curiosity’s sake, like a set of leatherbound encyclopedias from the 1800s and a rare treatise on alchemy.
Any extra room on the shelves–there shouldn’t be much–will be filled with the sorts of items one might find in a wunderkammer: A goblet made of agate, a hand of glory, a string of snake vertebrate, a large stuffed bat, and whatever other unusual object catches our fancy.
Finally, we’ll arrange periodic visits from a babysitter and a maid service so that Sisifo can retire, guiltless, into her very own library and relax.
Happy holidays, Sisifo! I hope you like what I “got” you!
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