Random gifts I remember

Here are some memories I have about gifts given to me on different times on my life! A few are still around, and others are long lost, but they prevail in my memory, and now here.

Gifts, for Christmas, my birthday, some holiday, or for no particular reason, are something to be cherish, sometimes they don’t hold a lot of monetary or practical value, but when they come from someone significant to us, they can hold a special place for me.

Even then, over time, some gifts are forgotten, replaced or end up thrown away, when something new comes up. However, some manage to stay in my memory for some reason. Therefore, I decided to write down some of those, I guess! Just in case a day comes where I can no longer remember them.

A coin collection

When I turned, I think 12 or maybe 13. I actually can’t recall. My uncle, who likes to collect coins, gave me a special set he had collected just for me.

It consisted of a bunch of coins from my country that were produced in the year I was born, including some limited rare editions as well, all of them in pristine condition.

I clearly remember the mixed feelings of being happy by its significance and because I really liked my uncle, and being a bit bored or dissapointed, because I was a just a kid who wanted toys. He could notice, I think, but smiled and probably told me something like “you’ll get it when you get older”

And yeah, these coins remains safely stored, and they are the kind of thing that are just super cool to own. They are the same age as me, after all!

In a sense, they are just coins and they are just there, but I am really happy to have them.

Fun fact, that same uncle also gifted me a watch! It’s actually the same watch I showcased in the one post that kind of ended up starting the Casio Cult.

A set of origami paper

As a fan of origami, I’ve never actually bought proper origami paper! I always just used printing paper or notebook sheets, at most I used kraft paper for big orgami projects like a Christmas tree I did in middle school that was almost 1 meter tall.

A few years back, a dear friend from the Fediverse sent me some paper straight from Japan! I was so so happy because of it, and I am also so scared to even use it! I will probably try it out sometime soon, it is meant to be used, after all.

It is very varied, with really pretty patterns and colors, I don’t even know what figure to fold with it! Maybe a horse, or a rat, or an elephant! We’ll see.

You’ll probably read this, so, thank you very much again, you’re great!

A random handheld with one game

I still remember this one quite clearly, I think. My grandfather passed away, this is when I was like, 4 or 5 years old. We lived far away at the time, and only my mom could afford to make the trip for the funeral. When she returned, she brought some things from family members, including a couple gifts for us.

From the bag, I remember picking up a handheld console, it was one of those that could only play one game, in the vein of the Game & Watch, except that it was branded after some TV Show or something similar. I remember the casing had stickers or art of some musclehead dude and the game was a sort of super simple beat’em up.

The device didn’t really have a lot of significance, I think I was pretty young and the game was complicated enough for me to simply not get it, but maybe because of the cirumstances, I just have it in my memory after all these years. I have no idea where that console ended up and I don’t really think it was some valuable collectible today. Just one of the many cheap mass-produced licensed kid toys or whatever—queue some collector recognizing the device by my poor description telling me it’s worth a fortune today.

A spinning top

I was maybe in 2nd grade of primary school when my parents gifted me a spinning top. It might have been for my birthday, since I remember we were on vacation with my cousins. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to spin it. But I really liked it! My mom would spin it for me sometimes, and I can remember clearly getting into 3rd grade at school and finally learning how to do it.

Kids around me were able to do cool tricks like boomerangs and other acrobatics that I couldn’t yet.

At some poing that spinning top got lost somewhere. It had a transparent light blue color, and it was not from one of the popular brands sold during spinning top season, didn’t matter to me, it spun and that was it!

Eventually I learned all the cool tricks in the book, and would play cancazos—a game where you try to strike each other’s spinning tops, sometimes breaking it—with my classmates. I also remember a small competition held in small shop across the street, where some guy—that worked for the brand I assume—performed some tricks and we would all try to do them, and whoever managed to learn them would win their top of the line model! I managed to get one, but I think I ended up giving it away years later.

Spinning tops are pretty cheap, maybe 2 or 3 bucks even today, but that gift my parents gave me was a trigger that kind of helped get into other hobbies, such as speedcubing and card tricks!

A samsung galaxy S3 mini

This was a gift I didn’t really expect! But my dad passed down his phone to me! It was 2015, and the S3 mini was already old, but still a pretty cool device, with quite a few roms available to try out. It was the first device I rooted and messed around with, installing custom roms and Xposed modules.

I am honestly quite surprised at how active the scene was around this device. There were a lot of AOSP based roms, from 4.4 KitKat to Android 7 Nougat. Being able to live through all of that evolution was honestly really fun.

This is also a phone had some pretty interesting custom roms based on the stock firmware! Cleaned up builds that retained some of Samsung’s TouchWiz—do you guys remember TouchWiz???—had better battery life, less bloat and the like! I remember trying many of them showcased by random YouTube channels with 15 subscribers, crazy times.

Without this phone, I would have taken much more time to get into customization, and I probably wouldn’t have discovered FOSS the way I did.

Finishing thoughts

There are some other gifts I’ve had over the years, some are probably more important than the ones I mention here. Such as the PSP!, which only gets an honorable mention, even though it’s quite simply the most life-changing device in my life! Because I have already talked about it in many previous posts.

The gifts I mentioned here were plenty enough for a blogpost, I guess, or who knows, maybe I’ll end up writing a series about this, for some reason. It’s been nice to once again reminisce in some memories of this relatively short life of mine.

So, what are some random gifts that you were given throughout your life, and that you still remember, or even keep, to this day?

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