Twelve Christmases. Eleven Presents Still In The Cupboard. And One She Actually Uses.
My mother has been telling me not to buy her anything since 2014.
She says it every September, always on the telephone, always in the same brisk voice that doesn't invite a discussion. Alison, I don't need a single thing. Don't you dare waste your money on me.
And every year I ignore her, because what else are you supposed to do with your own mother at Christmas. And every year, it turns out, I got it wrong.
I know I got it wrong because last February I went looking for a spare pillowcase, and I found the cupboard.
It's the one on her landing. Second shelf up. And on that shelf, stacked very neatly, was almost everything I had bought her for a decade.
The pashmina from 2016, still folded in its tissue. A boxed set of bath things. A photograph frame, still in its cellophane. Slippers, in the right size, in the box, never worn.
She hadn't put them there to be unkind. I know exactly why she'd done it. She didn't want me seeing them unused and feeling bad, so she tidied them away and said thank you very much every single year and meant every word of it.
The problem isn't that my mother is ungrateful. The problem is that she is seventy-seven, she has a small house she has lived in for forty-one years, and she is quietly trying to own less, not more. Every scented candle I buy her is one more object she has to find a home for and then feel guilty about not burning.
I expect a good few of you are buying for someone like this. A mother, a mother-in-law, an aunt, an older sister. Someone who has everything she needs and doesn't want any more of it.
What she needed wasn't another nice thing to put away. It was a better version of something she already used every single day.
Then I Noticed The Bag
It was the same visit, as it happens. I was carrying the pillowcase back down and I nearly went over on it.
One of those cheap mesh pop-up laundry bags, the sort that costs about six pounds and folds down into a circle. Hers had given up years ago. It sat half collapsed on the carpet at the end of her bed with the washing sliding out of one side, and she stepped round it the way you step round something that's been in your way so long you've stopped seeing it.
I said, Mum, that thing's had it.
She said, it still works.
That is my mother's entire philosophy in three words, and it is precisely why she will never in her life spend thirty-five pounds on a laundry basket.
And that was the whole thing, wasn't it. Sitting right there on the carpet.
The present she needed wasn't a treat. It was the thing she looks at every morning of her life, bought properly, by somebody else, so she never has to justify the money to herself.
Thirty-Seven Designs, And One Of Them Was Her
I found Evely Rose Boutique that evening — a small British boutique that's been quietly selling to women our mothers' age for a few years now. They make quilted laundry baskets. Proper ones: padded cotton with a structured base, so they stand up on their own instead of folding in half the moment you put anything in them.
There were thirty-seven designs. That sounds like a daft number until you're scrolling through them at eleven at night trying to find your own mother in a list of patterns.
She has a pond at the bottom of her garden. She has stood at that kitchen window and told me about the dragonflies on it more times than either of us could count.
So I ordered the Mily | Dragonfly Garden one. I felt rather pleased with myself. Then I worried for three straight weeks that I'd got it wrong again.
What She Said On Boxing Day
She opened it on Boxing Day, because we do ours late.
She lifted it out of the box, held it up by the handles, turned it round once, and said: "Alison. Where did you get this?"
I want to be precise about why that mattered. My mother has thanked me for every present I have ever given her. She has never once asked me where I got one.
Then she took it upstairs, and when she came back down she told me the dragonfly was the same blue as the ones on her pond. It isn't, really. I wasn't about to argue.
It is now the middle of September. That basket has stood in the corner of her bedroom for nearly nine months. It is full, every day, of her washing.
She has told my brother about it. Both of her neighbours. And a woman at her church whose name I don't know.
Last month she telephoned me to say she had wiped a mark off it with a damp cloth and it had come straight off. She rang me. About that.
Three Things I Have Learned
One. The best present is something she already uses, made properly. Not a treat. Not a luxury. Not another object she has to find a home for. Walk round her house and look for the thing that is worn out and that she has stopped seeing. That is your present, and it has been sitting there for years.
Two. It has to be something she would never buy herself. My mother would walk past a thirty-five pound laundry basket without breaking stride. That is exactly what makes it a good gift. The entire point of a present is that it's a decision somebody else made on your behalf.
Three. Choose the design for her, not for you. I would not have picked dragonflies for my own house. That is the whole idea. With thirty-seven to go through, the job isn't finding a nice one — it's finding hers. Give it ten minutes and you will know it when you see it.
About The Price
They are £70 normally, which I would not have paid, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
They start at £34.95 at the moment, in the autumn sale. For something she has used every day for nine months, that works out at roughly twelve pence a day. I'm well aware that's the sort of sum people do in advertisements. I did actually work it out, and it is about twelve pence a day.
They're rated 4.8 out of 5, and I read the reviews properly before ordering, because I have been caught out before. There are thirty days to send it back. I didn't need them.
"I bought the cat one for my mum's eightieth and then ordered a second for myself about a fortnight later, which I think tells you everything. Hers lives in her bedroom. Mine has the towels in it." — Helen M., Shrewsbury
What I Would Tell You If We Were Friends
If you're reading this in September, you have time, and that is worth more than you think. I left it late one year and ended up paying for next-day delivery on something she didn't want anyway.
Go and look round her house. Not at what's missing — at what's worn out. The thing she steps round. The thing she says still works. That's the one.
And if you're reading this and you are the mother in this story — the one who tells everybody every year that she doesn't want anything — then buy the thing yourself. I have bought three more since Christmas. Two were presents. One is in my own bathroom with the towels in it, and I hadn't told a living soul I'd bought it for myself until just now.
She still tells me not to buy her anything. I have stopped believing her.
Alison
Mily | Dragonfly Garden Laundry Basket
- Quilted padded cotton, not thin printed nylon
- Structured base — stands up on its own, full or empty
- Wipes clean, and fully machine washable
- 37 designs to choose from
- Free UK delivery