Picture by dantaylr on Flickr

I was a peculiar child. Peculiar in that bookwormy, writery, reading-absolutely-everything-I-could kind of way. I’m guessing that I’m amongst similarly peculiar friends here on the blogosphere.

We – my sister and I – always had lots of presents at Christmas, but the ones that stand out the most are the strange ones, the ones that were slightly bizarre. The ones that indulged my peculiarity.

And the year that Father Christmas brought me a crisp brown envelope with 50 sheets of brand new white paper in it.

We used to have loads of paper all the time; pastel colours with typing on the back that was someone else’s scrap. It was kept in a box in the store room, and the box never ran out of paper so we always had more than we needed.

But we never had our very own paper that no-one had written on and was absolutely untouched. And so I asked Father Christmas to bring me some and he did.  Because I’m guessing I was somewhere around nine or ten years old and he’d probably realised by then that my weird side was there to stay.

I don’t remember what I did with the paper, whether I wrote anything particularly worthy on it or whether I was frivolous with it. I suspect that I treated it very carefully and used it sparingly.

I do remember, though, carrying it around with me on Christmas morning. We used to tour around visiting people, and we used to take some of our favourite presents with us.

I remember proudly carrying my envelope of paper around, with the cooler and more ordinary members of the family looking at me ever so strangely as I explained that it was paper – fabulous, brand new, all my very own, ordinary white paper.

I couldn’t really understand why no-one seemed quite so thrilled as I was.

“The Best Gift Ever” is one of this week’s writing prompts from Mama Kat over at Mama’s Losin’ It