Culture

Best gifts, worst gifts: an offensive candle

December 04, 2011
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Jemima Khan

A scented candle from someone you’re close to is always offensively unimaginative.

Sam Leith

The best presents I’ve ever received have been from the mother of my children. I don’t mean the children. It’s probably a toss-up between the signed first edition of Berryman’s Sonnets (an early work by my favourite poet), and the big Le Creuset casserole. One sits in a cupboard of Most Precious Things and gives me pleasure just knowing it’s there. The other is in constant use, and gives constant pleasure.

The worst present I’ve ever been given? I hope a certain close family member won’t be offended if I say that the Christmas he bought everyone a slanket off the Internet wasn’t his best ever. Modesty forbids my boasting about my own donational triumphs. Failures? Let’s just say I think other people get less excited about arcane items of kitchenware than I do.

Nicola Horlick

I am sure we all get wedding presents that get shoved in a cupboard and forgotten about, but I think that I received the most bizarre gift ever from an aunt of my first husband’s when we got married in 1984. It arrived in a box that was about eight inches square. When I opened it, there was something heavy wrapped in tissue and I thought it might be a paperweight. When I unwrapped it, it was the bottom crystal from a chandelier. Bemused, I turned it over and over and held it up, wondering what to do with it. There was a hole through the top of it and so I thought that we could use it as a Christmas decoration. When Christmas came, it was too heavy for the tree, making the branch droop to the floor, so I put it in a box and pushed it to the back of a drawer, where it has remained for the last 27 years.

One of the best presents I have ever received is a silver paper-knife with a mother of pearl handle, which my eldest daughter gave me a couple of years ago. I open the mail with it every day and think of her.

More: Ian Rankin, Jon Snow and others tell Prospect about their best presents—and the worst—here