The double-helix of my DNA must have twisted a little too tight, because I’ve looked and acted differently than the other girls in my all-American family. My two cousins had long, flaxen hair that their mother ironed pin-straight, while I sat with my super-short, mousy-brown curls, itching with envy. While they had stonewashed jean jackets I had a magenta sweatsuit. When they were sneaking out to date boys, I read books and tried out for theater productions. While their medical emergencies resulted in pink casts covered in signatures, mine concluded with an asthma inhaler that the pack of popular girls liked to steal during recess.

My cousins were the closest thing I had to sisters, but they were so different from me that I was transfixed to the point of nearly objectifying them. Between the two, Vicky was the one I looked up to most. Two years older than me, and the baby of my uncle’s family, she was born with naturally blonde hair and a perfect face. Every family get-together was punctuated by my tantrums about the way that genetics wasn’t fair, until my exasperated aunt quietly explained to me that "some get the looks, others get the brains." I would have traded my A- average for Vicky’s social life in a heartbeat, even if she thought that cheese grew on trees and that electricity was an animal. When we both had crushes on Luke Perry on 90210 I lived in fear, because if he ever met Vicky he’d certainly wind up with her.  

When we got older the polarity of us remained. While I learned to play bass guitar alone in my room she started dating a football coach with a Nike "swoosh" tattoo. (No joke.) My first job was as a secretary for a photographer, hers was as a waitress at Hooters. I got health insurance and overtime, while she made nearly $1,200 a shift, and was given gifts that included a diamond bracelet and a watch.

Though my family wasn’t proud, it was safe to say that Vicky had learned to work with what God gave her, capitalizing on her whiplash-causing good looks and attitude. Even if we didn’t understand each other we remained tight, though nearly everything I did she regarded as though it were a joke. ("No, really, I competitively recite poetry. I’m serious.") I was sort of like the family mascot, a little cute, a little silly, and never really capable of much more than entertaining a crowd. All I wanted was for Vicky to respect me, because even if I couldn’t look like her or be as powerful, or powerfully blonde, to gain her acceptance would mean that I had come close. My friends with older same-sex siblings have described a similar sense of wanting to belong when it came to spending time with their seemingly-almighty kin. Even though I’m in my late twenties I still look at Vicky’s approval as that final plateau, that never-to-be-achieved medal of normalcy. Every time she laughed at me and not with me was another piece of evidence that, yup, I really am that weird.

Needless to say, gift shopping for my family has always presented a bit of a challenge. I’m too self-centered to truly be good at getting people gifts that I wouldn’t want. Fortunately this year Vicky suggested a grab-bag, a game that Simon remembered being called "Dirty Santa" when he was in high-school. There were five of us: Vicky, myself, Simon, my other cousin Stephanie, and her husband. The parameters were simple, we couldn’t exceed $25, and we couldn’t tell anyone what we had gotten. While browsing for a pair of earrings online, I impulsively picked up a bunch of crap from Urban Outfitters: meatball bubblegum, Astronaut Ice Cream, a miniature unicorn, a hardcover blank book, and The Incredible Toy Stick. For those of you smart enough to shop in stores that aren’t bastions of irony, The Incredible Toy Stick is one of those gag gifts that UO has become notorious for.  It’s a brown plastic stick in a cardboard box, and it comes with an instruction manual listing its facetious "200 uses.” It was $8, and rounded my grab bag up to a respectable, if heavy-handed, twenty-seven bucks.

 
As a sidenote that begs to be illuminated: Urban Outfitters knows what they’re doing. In their corporate statement they say that they look to provide, "a lifestyle-specific shopping experience" to create "an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer we serve." Meaning that they are playing us like a cheap slide-whistle, friends. They’re marketing sentimentality, often to kids who don’t even realize what they’re forking over cash for. If I see one more pimply boy under the age of 18 wearing an Atari tee-shirt I’ll scream. So when I was buying my aunt a pair of purple dangling earrings for Christmas, and decided to purchase a bunch of junk for the grab-bag, it wasn’t ’cause Urban Outfitters had plucked my heartstrings the right way. Nuh-uh. I didn’t fall for it, they were simply an impulse buy. Because I’m not one to be toyed with like that. Even as I sit here in my vintage letter jacket and skinny jeans, I am no lemming. My apathy is sincere.

This tirade aside, I can say with great confidence that Vicky has never shopped at Urban Outfitters. She is usually clad in head-to-toe BEBE, wearing at least one item with the logo bejeweled in rhinestones. She has never owned an ironic tee-shirt or an item of clothing that is not considered "in season." I hate to be redundant but, truly, she is my physical opposite. So when she was duped by her own devices in the game of Dirty Santa and wound up with my gift, I cringed. There was my goddess-like cousin with my cheesy, weirdo gift. At least she could use the box for something, right?
She opened it up and looked at the meatball gum and the tiny, plastic unicorn, puzzled. "This one’s yours, Ains?" I nodded sheepishly. 

She pulled out the ice cream. "Oh my God, Steph, look, it’s the ice cream we used to get at the planetarium," she said to her sister, laughing. Good, I thought. Even blondes can feel nostalgia.

She opened the journal and read the cover out-loud, "The Young Lady & Gentleman’s Guide To Misconduct." Oh no. This was not going to end well. She doesn’t even read books, let alone write in them, I thought. "I could use this," she said to me, in the all-too-obvious tone of trying-not-to-be-rude. I knew that tone well. I had just used it when I’d opened my grab-bag pick, a digital photo keychain.

Then Vicky opened the last trinket, The Incredible Toy Stick.

 
At first she was confused. "It’s a stick?" Then she opened it further, pulling out the list of instructions and, much to my surprise, she started to read. That’s when she started laughing in earnest, the kind of laughter that was silent it was so hard, then growing in volume to a near-shriek. She read the copy out loud.

"Use it to dial telephone numbers from far away! Use it to play golf!" She was hysterical, acting out each of the instructions one by one. I had never seen her so silly. It was good enough to know that she liked my gift, but it was even better to know  why.

Products like that are only as successful as their packaging. It was expertly thought-out and well-written. In short, my line of work is what helped to craft the best gift I’d ever given my hard-to-please cousin. Without the tongue-in-cheek instructions, and the over-the-top and somewhat sarcastic box, she would have only gotten a plastic stick that made little sense and served even less of a purpose. And even though I can’t say it was the true meaning of Christmas, seeing what I do in action was a nice gift. The nature of copy is to sell products in a convincing and compelling manner, just like how Urban Outfitters looks for their company to connect with their customers on an emotional level on a whole. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like that’s slimy, but as I watched my cousin pretend to use her Incredible Toy Stick as a unibrow, I felt good that I write words to make money. And I suddenly felt a familiar pang of jealousy, only this time it was for some unknown copywriter who bought their Christmas gifts with money made from writing about a plastic toy stick.

For the record, Simon pulled the Snuggie on his grab-bag turn. It was pink for breast cancer awareness. My cousins thought the image of him in a Snuggie holding a toy stick was hilarious, while I thought the glorified blanket-with-sleeves smelled really funny when he took it out of the package.

(Simon, Snuggie, and The Incredible Toy Stick)

Tags: Christmas, copywriting in action, family is what you make it, gifts that are awesome, holidaze, jealous of blondes, my hot cousin, Simon, what I do for a living, where is Luke Perry now?

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