20 December 2012

Instead Of An Apple

I confess to a great distaste for giving gift cards or money to people at Christmas time. In fact, I'm not really a fan of tipping in general. I do it, because one must, I tip in restaurants and taxi cabs, and I mailed a Christmas check to the newspaper delivery person who I've never laid eyes on, and certain young people of my acquaintance are getting Amex cards, but I've never felt inclined to give a cash gift to my child's school teacher - it's too much like a tip, and Amy Vanderbilt says you don't tip professionals. I know, it's just me, and you may well have lots of arguments as to why the teacher needs the money, and how it's likely that that money will be spent back into the classroom. That said, I very much like giving little gifts at Christmas to people who are important to me and to us, and my kid's teacher certainly falls into that category.

Remembering that on open school night my daughter's teacher had confessed to an Amazon habit to feed her classroom library, and knowing that she had a Scholastic wish list, I decided that a book would be the right gift. I ended up getting a copy of The Doll People, a book my daughter had recently read and loved, and which I knew (from her) not to be on the classroom shelves.



To gussy up the gift, I printed a set of bookplates using art work from Helen Dardik's Orange You Lucky blog. I cut and pasted the art (free to use as long as it's credited back to Helen, thank you Helen!) into a Word template for Avery 5163 labels, figured out how to type on top of the image (so they could be personalized), printed them out, and whacked them a bit with the paper cutter. A spare label (from the outtakes) went into the book; ten more bookplates were tucked into the card. I was really pleased with the end result.

Happy Christmas to a super wonderful teacher!

4 comments:

Mental P Mama said...

Such a wonderful thing to do!! I used to do that, too. In the good ol' days:)

Kizz said...

Great idea!

I don't have too many folks in my life that I debate tipping but there are some that I think really deserve it. The dog walker got a tip today for many reasons and the porter in my building is getting one because my dog barks at him every single fucking time we see him and he's still really nice to me, even going out of his way to open the door for us to pass, barking all the while. Leo has class and a thick skin.

Everyone else is getting cookies.

Bibliomama said...

I do cookies or chocolate, but I do give the teachers gift cards unless I know them well enough to pick out a book, because my preference for the whole entire world is to buy everyone a book. We just left a box of chocolates with a 'to the mailman' tag on it in the mailbox.

Kyla said...

That is a great idea! We don't really have a lot of extra Christmas loot, but my mom makes homemade bath goodies for the kids' teachers. This is a good idea to keep in my back pocket, though!