Lexi Derrickson, a Bethesda third-grader, labored for hours over her teacher's Christmas present this year. Scratch cookies made from all the good stuff -- flour, sugar, butter, chocolate chips, peanut butter and almonds -- are not that easy to stir, she discovered, especially if you're staying with your dad on weekends and he doesn't have "one of those blender things."
What will Kirsten Crabtree, her teacher at Wood Acres Elementary, think about her gift? Lexi has worried about this for several days. "I know she'll like the cookies. Well, actually, I'm not sure. I think she will like them." Her round face turns momentarily somber.
Bethesda's Lexi Derrickson presents a card and homemade cookies to her teacher, Kirsten Crabtree.
(James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)
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Oh, the anticipation -- and agony -- of baking, sewing, painting or buying a Christmas present for your teacher. Shaping candy cane ornaments out of flour, sugar and salt, snowmen out of buttons, reindeer out of pipe cleaners. Or standing in the shopping mall before endless shelves of bath products, completely overwhelmed by the sheer variety of soaps, oils and powders.
What if your reindeer ends up looking like a dog? Does your teacher prefer the scent of lavender or rose? What if that rich girl in the front row, the one whose scrunchies always match her sweater and socks, gives the teacher a day at the spa? The $5 mug you bought with your own money is going to seem mighty puny compared with that.
Not to worry about the mug, teachers say.
Most of them can't get going in the morning without a cup of coffee, so the odds are they'll be sipping from it long after Elizabeth Arden has faded from memory. Affluent parents sending teachers to exotic places may grab holiday headlines, but years after students depart from their classrooms, the presents teachers remember most are those that came from the children themselves.
Ruth Neikirk, a retired sixth-grade teacher, has a house in Arlington full of such items that she brings out during the Christmas season: a little angel needlepointed 20 years ago by a boy named Tom; a china shoe from a boy named Tucker four years ago; a holiday banner of felt glued together by a girl named Caitlin who is now a freshman at the University of Virginia.
During her 27 years of teaching, Neikirk made a point of writing on each Christmas gift the name of the giver and the year. At least a month before Christmas every year, her husband, William, feigning annoyance, pulls out the boxes from closets on all three levels of their home and, after their holiday display, slides them all back in. His load includes a box of gifts that over the years have broken into pieces. Ruth tells herself every year she'll repair them.
She makes no apologies for her collection. "I like having my students all around me," she says.
Teachers have but to mention that they enjoy one particular thing, chocolate, for instance, and by the time they leave for winter break they've gotten so many Hershey bars and Godiva truffles that they're giving them away.
When they don't say anything they still can be surprised. Three years ago, Lynne Kolkemeyer, who teaches with Crabtree at Wood Acres in Bethesda, was delighted to receive a pillow that had been cut out, stuffed and sewn by her student Melissa Longano and Melissa's friend. The pillow was not exactly square and its stitches not exactly straight, but it made the hard seat of her room's rocking chair a lot more comfortable.
Ginny Berkey, a middle school teacher in Eugene, Ore., was surprised one December to find a white Easter mug on her desk with the saying "Never count your chicks before they hatch." The student's mom dropped by later that day to explain that her son insisted that it made a perfect gift since the class had just spent four days discussing American proverbs.
The first year Alisha Colyer, a health instructor in a middle school near Columbus, Ohio, was teaching, she allowed a student having trouble at home to come to her room early in the morning to work in peace. "Last Christmas he brought me a bag filled with wonderful things," she says. "My favorite Pop Tarts, a Dr Pepper, some notebook paper and pencils" like the ones he was always borrowing from her.
The item that really got to her was a towel.
