The Decrepit Gift Certificate: A Spending Story

If you had $100 dollars to spend at Williams-Sonoma, what would you buy?

I got to find out this weekend when I finally spent a gift certificate that I received as a wedding gift in 2001. Yes, I had saved it for all of these years, sometimes in a drawer, sometimes at the bottom of my purse. It traveled with me when I didn't need it and it was invariably at home when I did not.

When Izzy was born, it ended up at the bottom of his diaper bag where it was sadly abused and neglected. It became crumpled, stained and waterlogged and was beginning to disintegrate in the middle. Several months ago, N., my sometime organizer, recommended that I spend it as soon as possible before it was no longer valid. So I placed it in a safe place and promptly forgot about it until recently.

On Saturday I had a rare outing without Izzy and I brought the certificate along with me. My friend D. encouraged me to finally use it. It was in such a sorry state that I was slightly embarrassed to bring it into the store so my she. came along to egg me on. She was returning the favor since I had once accompanied her on a similar mission. She suggested I tell them that the gift certificate was one of the few belongings I was lucky enough to retrieve from Hurricane Katrina.

It was great fun looking around and deciding what indeed to purchase. So many things in that store call my name. I wanted the Kitchen Aid ice-cream making attachment but that would have used up nearly the entire amount. I also put down the Bug Cakelet pan, figuring that they were bound to go on sale (How many people do you know who would make bug cupcakes?).

When I saw the Nutmeg Grinder I couldn't imagine how I had gotten along without one but then I set it down in favor of some 3-D Halloween cookie cutters which I thought would be a hit with Izzy and friends.


What else? Now that summer is almost over, I still needed David Lebovitz's book, The Perfect Scoop. We can still eat ice cream in autumn, right? And I couldn't pass up the chance to get a Yogurt Maker, which I had been ogling since reading French Women Don't Get Fat.