What do you get a farmer for Christmas?
There are a lot of things that light up a farmer’s eyes, but few of them can be gift-wrapped and placed under a tree. It’s hard to put a ribbon around a spring rain or a spike in canola prices. With any other person, even the ones who don’t want any more stuff cluttering up the house, you can always put a gift certificate on the tree for a herbal massage down at the Rankin’s Beach Spa or a bed and breakfast package at the new Whispering Pines Golf Course in Larkspur.
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But the farmer in the family would be about as likely to let some Viking lady pound the knots out of his neck muscles as he is to sit through an evening of chamber music. And the last time he slept overnight away from home was when he drove to Iowa to take ceremonial delivery of his new combine.
What to do?
For some reason, the women of Petunia Valley are always bugging me for gift ideas for their husbands at this time of the year. My wife says it’s not because I’m some kind of a Christmas wise man. It’s because I spend so much time with their husbands down at the Kingbird Café they think I might have some insider knowledge. I don’t. They would rather have seborrhoeich warts burned off their nether regions than talk about Christmas presents.
To help the ladies out, I always suggest they start with the question asked by the great psychiatrist Carl Jung. “What is it that makes time fly for the man?” Once you can put your finger on that one, a gift idea is never too far behind. Take Owly Drysdale, for example. He’s been keeping Shorthorns on a drumlin high up on Hall’s Hill since 1946. If you came right out and asked him what he would really like for Christmas he would probably tell you something unhelpful.
“Hmm,” he would say. “I’d like the wind to drop once in awhile or… you know what? I’d really like a dog that came when it was called. If you ever find one, I don’t care where you are, call me collect. I’ll pay the shipping.” But if you watch Owly closely, you will notice that he is absolutely fascinated by western novels. They sit on the dashboard of his truck, they’re lined up on a shelf behind the wood-stove. So his wife, Howly, calls me every year to help her find a couple of new titles he would never see in the grocery store.
Bert and Bob Pargeter are more of a challenge. They circle their fields on big tractors for eight months of the year and the rest of the time they blow snow. They do go ice fishing occasionally but they now have a retired grain bin jammed full of fishing equipment. They don’t need another downrigger or a package of meps lures. But again, if you sit in the tractor with either of them you will notice that Bert’s dashboard screen is always tuned to the weather. He is always analysing the atmosphere. He loves thermometers, barometers, psychrometers, anemometers… you get the picture. Every vehicle he owns is a moving weather station. So, I’ve been helping Roxanne add to his forecasting skills with glossy books on cloud formations and CDs that drone on about humidity and leaf wetness patterns.
And Bob’s secret passion is bugs and weeds. The man could teach a course on integrated pest management at the ag college if he ever gets tired of farming. Last year, Heidi and I found him an interactive CD-ROM series that identifies 3,500 North American crop-eating insects in living Technicolor. It was expensive, but Roxanne says he takes it to bed with him at night like it’s a teddy bear. This year he’s getting the same thing in the weed version.
And me? At my age, I get excited by hot soup. However, my wife has learned that time disappears for me in the sandbox, just as it did when I was five. It’s a virtual sandbox, of course, somewhere between my occipital lobe and frontal cortex and I can be found there most days, unless the sheep are out. My wife and children have learned that any gift that adds colour to that cluttered space is sure to hit the mark.
