Gift-giving Blunders: A Pig Comes Home for Christmas

One thing I remember clearly from my childhood is this: My mom has always loved pigs.

Pigs made out of felt appliquéd to her apron, little marble pig figurines prancing across her desk top, pigs staring up at her from her morning coffee mug.

My mother is endlessly elegant and lovely, and so it comes with a touch of irony that pigs have always been her animal of choice. For a woman who served as First Lady Nancy Reagan’s correspondence assistant and later started her own etiquette consulting business, it is an unlikely affinity. Maybe it’s the comic interpretation of pigs as nature’s unruly creatures that attracts my mom in some ironic way. 

When I was young, my siblings and I took our mother’s love for pig paraphernalia quite literally. Christmas was coming, and we wanted to give her what she most liked.

Even though I was in elementary school, I remember the day vividly. My dad piled my two siblings and me into our station wagon and drove us to a farm on the outskirts of our hometown of Lancaster, PA. We took our pick from a wriggling litter of black Vietnamese potbelly pigs, draped a red Christmas bow around its neck, and, with great anticipation, brought the squealing bundle home.

It is only through the lens of hindsight that I can accurately interpret my mom’s reaction. At the time, I perceived nothing but glee, but now I can remember my mom’s face registered with complete shock.

When I set out to revisit this amusing chapter of my childhood, I thought to myself, I have no idea what my Dad was thinking to endorse such a gift. So I gave him a call, and this is what I found out:

“It’s actually pretty simple. Your mother has always had this strange fascination with pigs. She identifies something funny about them. They’ve got a peculiar look in their eyes, they’re said to be charming, friendly and intelligent—all of which we decided to put to the test. She had no preparation for it at all.”

My mom enjoyed the pig, at least for a time. She named it Faux Pas, a christening that further confirms the inherent irony of her attachment to such a creature. The little pig was everything she imagined it to be. In fact, it was a smart, charming little pig. When it looked up at you, its eyes did seem to twinkle, and its snout held a faint, up-turned expression.

In the end, my family simply didn’t have the lodging to accommodate the pig. The winter was bitterly cold, we had no barn and Faux Pas inhabited our garage. For my mom’s birthday on March 12th—roughly three months after the pig moved in with us—we honored her request to be “divested of her Christmas gift.” The pig was a gift in both the giving and removing. Faux Pas was sent to live in the country with our relatives. They renamed him Festus.

My dad recalls, “It was a pig out determined to win a popularity contest. It would cruise the neighborhood hoping to make new friends, and frankly, when we gave it to our relatives, your mother insisted that the pig had an eye for politics. She said it wanted to run for mayor. It would run down Main Street in a very charming, attention-getting way.”

As it turns out, my family name—Eberly—means “little boar” in German. Of the gift-giving blunder, my father remarks, “Perhaps we were guided by some invisible hand to commit the deed.” No matter how it’s all justified, those squeals will always remain an unforgettable piece of my family’s memory.