PEACE: Gift Exchange

Helen Algmin · 23 Apr 2008, 15:28 · from 2008-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: helenalgmin at yahoo.com (Helen Algmin)
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:28:12 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) PEACE: Gift Exchange
In-Reply-To: <480D90FF.7070002 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <473671.64772.qm at web65713.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>

Dave, I think this is a great explanation for the gift exchange.  I didn?t even pick up on him coming ?down? for breakfast.  I am laughing with Joe, though, because the first time I read Peace I thought, ?TOILET water? That?s a TERRIBLE gift!?

Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com> wrote:  I started thinking about the Christmas gift exchange (pearls for toilet 
water) in the first chapter, and what it reveals about Weer's family.

I don't believe Mr. Elliot did it. Not that he didn't sleep with Mab that
night; Roy Lackey proved he that did in this post: 
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0210/1901.txt.shtml. But "Old
men... do not make such gifts."

I believe that Della did it, but her motive wasn't generosity. She 
exploited her social inferiors (e.g. Mrs. Green as her "slavey").
The exchange was malicious, like her "Call me Della." It told Mab
"I know what you're up to with my father." This seems to have worked
as intended -- after her initial joy, Mab rushed upstairs to her room
and remained there half a day.

If you prefer a supernatural explanation, note that Mr. Elliot didn't
say the midnight visitor was "St. Nick," but "Old Nick" (the Devil).
A malicious gift exchange is more in his line of work than Santa's.
While he was at it, he could have replaced one or more stories in
"The Green Fairy Book" with wicked prophecies.

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