A dear family member has sent us a very generous and kind gift that also is large and fits neither our house nor our lifestyle.

An eight-bottle wine cooler is a very fine gift except it’s kind of a major appliance that eats up a lot of counter space. Also, unless we are planning heavy entertaining, we rarely have more than a bottle or two of wine in the house. We like wine, but we’re not connoisseurs. We buy it, we drink it. Sometimes we open it, have a glass, then let it turn to vinegar. We often buy wine at the supermarket. When people give us good bottles of wine, we save them for special occasions that never arrive. We keep them in a wine rack, next to a bottle of Diet Coke and a bottle of club soda.

But now we have an eight-bottle wine cooler to live up to. So. We could keep more wine in the house. That’s not unthinkable. We could start collecting audacious little cabernets and putting them in our wine cooler. But is it appropriate to alter one’s behavior for the sole purpose of accommodating a gift?

We put the cooler on a counter in the kitchen, where it looked very large and important and startled us every time we went into the kitchen.

“It’s a good gift,” I said, as we looked at it. “It would just be better if…”

“…it were something else?” Tom said.

We woke yesterday morning and the first thing we both thought was, “Oh, we now have an eight-bottle wine cooler.”

I had to do some baking and needed the counter space so I asked Tom to move the wine cooler. He picked it up and walked around and around the house, looking for another place to keep it. It eventually got kind of heavy so he just stuck it on a desk near the back door, where it looked very large and important and startled us every time went in or out of the house.

Finally, Tom rearranged our cabinets and found space that could accommodate an eight-bottle wine cooler. We put the cooler in the cabinet, plugged it in, and put two bottles of wine in it, since that’s what we happened to have. Now, we will either marvel at the cool freshness of our two bottles of audaciously low-priced wines when we drink them, or we will forget all about them.

No, I would not rather have received a gift card. (Of the several pro and con responses I received to that column, including a couple of letters in today’s paper, the pro people were all the givers of gift cards. No one but MsKrit reported liking to receive gift cards.)

I think we are going to love our wine cooler. And I think I know someone who needs a shoe wheel.

Labels: gifts, holidays, shopping