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What's the most memorable gift you've ever received?
I'm shamelessly stealing this from a reddit thread, but omitting the "Christmas" part to avoid excluding people who don't celebrate Christmas.
I'm shamelessly stealing this from a reddit thread, but omitting the "Christmas" part to avoid excluding people who don't celebrate Christmas.
For myself, it was a music album. Specifically, Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction. I got it somewhere between the ages of 12-14, I think. As for why it was memorable, it was the first time I ever truly enjoyed music. Up until then I'd only ever been exposed to a lot of music that I never really cared for and, at most, only ever kind of liked--music that was sometimes catchy, but never more than that.
A bit of background is important here: I was depressed ever since I was a kid and up until I was 18 or 19. There are a number of reasons for this that I'm not about to get into in this thread, but the result was that I very much saw the world as--in a figurative sense--a very gray and cold place. But the moment I put that album into my new CD player, I was dumbfounded. I got lost in music for the first time, and for the first time in a long time there was some color splashed onto my muted world.
In the grand scheme of things, it was just a small, insignificant piece of plastic, but to me it was everything. Because of that one album I gradually developed a love for music, and that love for music lead me to a passion for and career in programming, and now my life is better than it's ever been.
Sometime I'll need to grab another copy, just for nostalgia's sake :)
I'm going to interpret "memorable" as literally referring to the gift I remember the best, rather than the gift I enjoyed the most, or the most significant gift. This is just about the gift that sticks out most clearly in my memory.
That would be the photo album that my parents gave me for my 21st birthday... when I was 24. Yep. My father took 3 years to put a photo album of my life together. And it's not like he had to scrounge for material - he's been snap-happy for as long as I remember. That camera came out at the slightest excuse. There were plenty of photos for him to choose from. He just kept not getting around to it.
Meanwhile, for the whole 3 years, my mother kept telling me it was coming any time soon. That's why I remember it so much: I heard about it for 3 years before I finally got it!
Haha, I can see why you would remember that one so clearly! I bet he was procrastinating because there were just so many pictures to dig through. I have a bad habit of procrastinating tasks like that myself :)
For my son and his bride, I made a time capsule with a bottle of port my wife and I made the year they became a couple and a mallet out of cherry that was used during the ceremony to seal the capsule with the love letters each wrote to the other (sealing wax secured): https://imgur.com/a/m9UBG
Two things:
For like my seventh birthday, my cousin gave me a PS2 and a box full of games. That motherfucker kept me busy for sooooo long and I think cemented my video game hobby. Of course GTA went right up on the shelf I couldn't reach courtesy of my parents, but countless hours were spent on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 and Ratchet Deadlocked, among other titles. That meant the world to me when all I had was a Gameboy Advance and a Gamecube
I remember the first time I ever got my hands on a PS2. It was a good while after it had been released, and my dad, my brother and I went to get one from a local second-hand game shop. The PS1 and PS2 were easily the most defining gaming experiences of my childhood.
Also, dude, THPS. Man, that's a nostalgia trip right there. I might have to boot one of those up in an emulator soon!