Advent Calendar - December 9 - Grab Bag (An Ode to Lip Gloss)

This post is about gifts.  The gifts kids give their parents.  Actually, the gifts that parents give their kids money to get.  My mom used to pay to receive such gifts.  She would give my sister and me a certain amount of money (I can't remember how much now ... but it was enough to buy something thoughtful, but not extravagant) before Christmas and turn us loose in the mall (back in the day when you used to be able to do that) to shop for her.

Let's pretend she gave us each $10.  This was probably in the mid to late 70s, so that would be like ... $100 in today's money, right?  Probably not that much, but it was a lot to us.  So there we are in the mall with $10 each.  What could we possibly get Mom for Christmas that she doesn't already have?  I mean, she has everything already.  Except lip gloss.  So we head down to the little drug store and each buy some Kissing Potion for her.  Different flavors, obviously.  Probably cost about a dollar, not much more.

Actual 1970s Kissing Potion bottles

Well, what to do with all that leftover cash?  Well, we can't give it back, she'll know how much her gift cost.  Might as well head over to the Hello Kitty store and spend the rest!  So we did.  We got some of the coolest Sanrio stuff for ourselves with mom's Christmas money.

I'm not sure if we were just that naive or what ... but I'm not sure what made us think mom wouldn't figure out that the lip gloss didn't cost $10 ... and where the big bag of Hello Kitty stuff came from!

The reason I even remember this is because I'm pretty sure it has been a running joke at Christmas ever since.  Now that we're grown, we have started putting lip gloss in mom's Christmas stocking every year.