Bloganuary 9, 2023: What is the most memorable gift you have received?

Today’s Bloganuary prompt:

What is the most memorable gift you have received?

I truly don’t know how to answer this prompt. The cursor has been blinking on the blank screen for the past 20 minutes. I’ve stepped away from my computer, hoping the mental break would help. But here I am. Still struggling to settle on what I consider to be my most memorable gift.

It’s not that my mind is barren of ideas. I can remember plenty of presents that people have given me over the years. Some of them way back to when I was a child. It’s the wording of the prompt, itself, that’s throwing me for a loop.

It’s not asking for the best gift. Or the worst, for that matter. It’s asking me for the most memorable. The most memorable. How can memorable things be compared? How can something be more memorable than others? Either I can remember it or not; there is no grey space.

Crap. I recognize that I’m overthinking again. But, you know what? That’s ok, because look! I’ve written a few paragraphs already, and I finally feel I have some momentum to answer the prompt. Ha!

I don’t believe it’s possible to quantify how memorable something is. I could, however, quantify how fondly I remember something, so that’s what I’m going to use as the question.

What gift do you most fondly remember receiving?

And when it’s phrased that way, the one gift that stands out above all the others, is when I unwrapped the original Nintendo. I had dreamed about having my own game console for such a long time, but I never thought my mom would allow it. To see the box in my hands, rendered me speechless.

That’s definitely a core memory, and one that makes me smile, even to this day.