What can you possibly buy the girl who has everything? The answer, obviously, is somewhere to put it. This is why I always give the gift of storage.
Last Christmas Eve, for instance, while she was at work, I removed all of Queenie's furniture from her apartment and took it over to mine. When she came home - "Merry Christmas!" - there were no more cumbersome antique armchairs cluttering up her living room, and that unwieldy Regency armoire wasn't taking up valuable space in her boudoir anymore.
Of course, such a gift doesn't cost me any money, but it's the thought that counts as we all know. Indeed, her friends told me later that Queenie actually wept openly when she came home and mentally unwrapped the gloriously empty space she could now live in. Although that wasn't the impression I got from her. In fact Queenie called up later that very night, asking me if she could return her gift immediately. Rather rude, considering the effort I had put into picking it out. Naturally, I tried to talk her out of this rash and ungrateful course of action: You might like my gift better in the morning, I told her, so why don't you sleep on it, because that's exactly what I'm doing right now. Then I hung up the phone, rolled over and went back to sleep on my new four poster bed.
Christmas morning, in addition to the sparkling furniture under the tree and scattered elsewhere around my apartment, I awoke to discover members of the Boston Police Department Choir at my door singing that old traditional English hymn, "BPD Arrest Ye Merry Gentleman."
I don't know: it seems that no good deed goes unpunished, even at Christmas.
