Her momma didn't raise her right in Well now

First off, let me say that I believe in regifting. It makes perfect sense for those people who aren’t really special but that you have an obligation to give something to anyway. As long as it’s not fruitcake or anything made in someone’s personal kitchen, regift your little heart away. It’s perfectly within the rules of civilized society as we know it.

There are rules, however, beyond the fruitcake/homemade edict above.

1. Be mindful in your regifting. You never regift within the same circle. If the whole point is to pretend that you bought something special for someone not special, then you don’t want to be giving the exact same gift to a person as the original gifter gave to him/her. It’s a dead give-away and makes you look really tacky.

2. Be careful in your regifting. Just as you would take special care in removing pricetags from an original gift, make certain you have removed all gift-tags from a regift. Failing to do so can lead to some awkward moments. Decades ago, Donnal gave me a bath-soap basket for my month post-Christmas birthday. It was a lovely generic gift and I thanked her graciously. It would have been rude of me to make note of the message “To Donnal, Wishing you the Merriest of Christmases!” on the tag she’d inadvertently tucked into the basket filler and forgotten to remove. (Donnal had obviously tucked the tag into the gift to remind herself who to sent the basket when she wrote her you notes later. Our momma raised her daughters right, but everyone can accidentally overlook the details now and again.)

So I was perfectly in the right to regift a lovely tin of store bought cookies to my tenant. The cookies had come from Lottie at school (lovely damn tin full of toxins from someone who knows I am diabetic and obviously wishes me dead for some reason I cannot fathom). Leslie couldn’t possibly have gotten an identical gift from Lottie since the two of them do not know each other. Plus I’d made certain there were no pricetags or gift-tags hidden anywhere on the gaily beribboned tin (not even under the sugar-siren poison candy canes attached atop).

I knocked on Leslie’s door, gave her the always one-way token of holiday wishes, and, having made my season’s sharing gesture from land-lady to leaseholder, felt my duty done for another year. Another appropriate regift delivered appropriately.
All was right in the world of silly civil obligations.
Until…

I was headed out the door and happened to see, attached to the outside of the mailbox, the very gaily decorated tin of cookies I’d just given her. Attached was a tag - “To our mailman.”
How excessively rude of her! Seriously.
You don’t regift right there in the face of the person who gave you the gift.
It doesn’t matter if the gift is original or regiftted.
It’s just not done.

That’s it. I’m going to say it now, the worst condemnation I can lay upon her head.
My damn Yankee tenant, (Oregon isn’t South and everything not Southern is Yankeen)
obviously her momma didn’t raise her right.

Last updated December 24, 2016