Three days to go. We’re in the home stretch of the holiday shopping season, and if you’re feeling more stress than Christmas spirit you aren’t alone.

It starts earlier every year. Stores decorate in October; Black Friday has all but eclipsed Thanksgiving. It’s recreation for shopaholics, good for stores, good for the economy.

But as you rush to get the last gifts under the tree, consider this: Do you remember the gifts you bought last year? Do you remember the gifts you received last year?

I don’t. Except for a new sweater found in a drawer after being forgotten for a year, I couldn’t tell you a single thing I got last Christmas. Or bought for others. The gifts buried in the knee-deep sea of wrapping paper at our house undoubtedly included clothing, gift certificates and maybe a CD or two, but I honestly don’t remember.

There have been exactly two gifts that I remember and will never forget. One was a guitar. I was a teenager and had been saving for it for over a year. It seemed odd that it had taken over a year to arrive since I’d ordered it, but on Christmas morning the mystery was solved.

It had actually arrived months earlier, but my parents had sworn the dealer to secrecy. They’d made up the $150  difference between what I’d saved and the purchase price – a lot of money for them in those days – and on Christmas morning it was waiting. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and the best gift I’d ever received, or would receive.

The other gift remembered for life was one my wife and I gave to her entire family. Our principal possessions then included one small child and an old, North End house that devoured money faster than a bloodhound can down a plate of bacon. We were, in other words, pretty close to being broke.

Financially, Christmas couldn’t have come at a worse time. We were in the process of replacing the plumbing, the wiring, the furnace and other antiquities. To say that we didn’t have a lot of money for gifts would have been an understatement. We might have had $100 total to spend on what was then a fairly large family – parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins … Short of gift certificates to McDonald’s, it was obvious we couldn’t buy something for everybody.

So … we decided to make our gifts. Specifically, Christmas memory boxes. I did a fair amount of woodworking in those days, so we went to a lumber store and bought boards to make the sides, laminate for the backs and cedar strips to make compartments inside the boxes. I routed grooves near the front edges to hold panes of glass, which we had cut to size at a glass shop.

That sounds simple, and for a master woodworker it would have been. My skills fell somewhat short of the master level, however, and by the time we’d gotten the idea time had grown short. The number of boxes needed meant that I was working in my father-in-law’s basement workshop well into Christmas Eve.

My wife was equally busy making the contents of the compartments. Each compartment represented a branch of the family, each item in the compartments a person. My wife’s mother, then a secretary with the Washington State Patrol, was represented by a law enforcement insignia, her husband the deep-sea fishing buff by a fishing pole. Her cousin, then in her last year of college, by a cap and gown. Her uncle, who worked for Boeing, by an airplane. Her grandmother by miniature knitting needles … and so on.

Our compartment contained a miniature newspaper for yours truly, a  Joker playing card for my wife the family wit, a doll for our toddler daughter – and a baby bottle.

When the boxes were opened, the baby bottle had everyone stumped.  Until my wife’s aunt guessed the obvious – it was a way of announcing that we were expecting another child.

You could say it was corny, and in a way it was. But all of the relatives who got the memory boxes still reminisce about them and have them displayed in their homes some 30 years later.

Why did those gifts, which cost a few dollars each, make such an impression? Because there was something of us – and of the whole family – in them. We didn’t need to spend spend a lot of money or go on a shopping spree. Our gifts were simple, but they came from the heart. It seemed to be enough.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

 

Tim spent part of October and November in the Southwest. This is the second and last column from the trip.

PHOENIX – Phoenix is a great place in some ways, but I’ve spent so much time visiting relatives there that I’ve driven as far as Santa Fe and Tombstone looking for things to do – never knowing that one of the most interesting things was just a few miles away.

A musical friend was aghast to learn that in repeated trips to Phoenix my wife and I had never visited the Musical Instrument Museum.

“You’ve got to go,” he said. “You could spend a week there.”

In our defense, the museum is only three years old. But in that short time it’s established an international reputation as the best of its kind on the planet. That may be because it’s the only one of its kind on the planet.

I had no idea what to expect, but I definitely didn’t expect to see a guitar Eric Clapton played on classic Cream recordings that I spent hours struggling to learn as a kid. Or two of Carlos Santana’s guitars, or the Steinway piano John Lennon used to write “Imagine.” They alone would have been worth the price of admission.

But to say that MIM is a collection of instruments owned by famous people is like saying the Louvre is a collection of tapestries.There are some 15,000 instruments (roughly 6,000 are on display at any given time), from seed pods and gongs to high-tech wizardry. (A mechanical jazz “orchestra” plays instruments from saxophones to xylophones with no human musicians at all.)

The collection includes instruments from almost every country in the world. It has displays on how they’re made, a gallery where visitors can play them. It’s 200,000 square feet, cost $250 million and is the only museum in the world devoted entirely to the world’s musical instruments. They cover the spectrum from the classical to the bizarre – a Zambian thumb piano, a cello as tall as a grizzly bear, a guitar made from a Castrol oil can.

Five galleries allow visitors to see the instruments and hear the music from developed continents like Europe and the Americas to places so small and obscure you aren’t likely to have heard of them and would have trouble finding them on a map. Cape Verde, for example, a remote archipelago with so little going for it that a majority of its countrymen now live other places. Those who stayed play music, though, and they and their instruments are duly represented at MIM.

Most of the tours are self-guided. When you pay the admission fee ($18, with discounts for teens and children), a guide hands you a wireless receiver and headphones. As you approach each video display, you hear its audio accompaniment on your headphones. There’s no remote, no buttons to push, absolutely nothing in the way of digital frustration. Nirvana for technophobes.

The receiver, according to MIM President Carrie Heinonen, “automatically tunes to more than 300 sites around the museum, providing a soundtrack to the video offerings that bring to life the cultural traditions represented in song and dance. MIM is truly the most remarkable museum you’ll ever hear.”

As they pass from gallery to gallery, visitors hear the music of the world – from didgeridoos to Irish pub music to symphony orchestras. Videos show people playing music, singing it, dancing to it. Videos of Third World dancers made our jaws drop. Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire had nothing on these guys.

If you get weary walking from exhibit to exhibit (and you will), you can take in a special exhibit on “Women Who Rock,” featuring artists from Billie Holiday to Taylor Swift. Or make a reservation for a live performance in a world-class concert hall.

You don’t have to be a musician or a music buff to enjoy this museum. There’s something for everyone. The costumes alone are worth a visit, and who can’t enjoy the primal pleasure of banging a gong? Singer Tony Bennett was quoted as saying that everyone should visit MIM, which he called his “favorite museum in the world.”

I left there with a better appreciation of the role music plays in our lives. It’s existed longer than recorded history and is with us from birth to the grave. It transcends language and cultural barriers. It moves us in ways nothing else can. It’s “the language of the soul,” as visitors are reminded in multiple languages on everything from gallery walls to T-shirts.

Heinonen, who has worked in museums for more than 20 years, says that “until I came to MIM, I’d never actually heard someone say they’d been transformed by a visit to a museum. I hear it here on a regular basis, and I’ve experienced it myself.”

One visitor likened the experience to “walking into the soul of mankind.”

A long, exhausting walk. And worth every weary, aching muscle.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.