This Thanksgiving my son and daughter in law gave us a surprise present——a sonogram of our grandchild to be. Suddenly, the urge to knit was triggered. I love to do it but haven't for some years, after I'd made dozens of coats and sweaters for every man, woman and child of my acquaintance. A frenzied search through the house for saved patterns, yarns, and knitting tools ensued, as well as a search for yet more. (Perhaps you have to be a knitter to understand, but no matter the size of the stash, there's always need for more.)
 
After ordering the new stuff I needed and beginning the first project, there was a need for buttons——teeny tiny buttons——and that occasioned a holiday time visit to Bruce's Variety Store, the most amazing warren of treasures in the Washington metropolitan area. No one knows how Bruce's manages to stay afloat, or even how it can possibly ever control its inventory. But every holiday season its devotees give thanks that is still exists. Where else can you find moving eye buttons for sock puppets, thousands of beads and feathers for costumes, dreidels and mini—Santas, even tiny wooden boxes for painting? It is like a trip back to your childhood when malls were not stocked by MBAs with an eye to revenue per square foot.
 
As a sign of our appreciation, patrons laden with glue guns and Styrofoam cones wait patiently in line as the patrons at the register unload armfuls of tiny items to be counted and entered into the cash register. Of course, it's the kind of place where you always leave with a great deal more than you intended to purchase, so the line is always long but the patrons good natured. Perhaps we are all thinking of the use to which these odd bits will be put.
 
To those of us who love Bruce's, Cartier is a pallid substitute .
 
I know while I'm waiting I will think back to the hand made treasures which gave us and others such joy. My favorite is a poem laboriously written by my bilingual son in first grade. It said in Spanish that a mother is like the sun. That the moon and stars also give us light, but only a mother can give us warmth, too.
 
Hecho a mano...the very best sort of gift, I think.