'Thou Art A Boil, A Plague Sore!"

Seven years ago, I received leopard print lingerie trimmed with lace as a holiday gift. It looked something like this. Okay, did you really think I would give you a link to leopard skin lingerie on a blog about writing for young people?

The lingerie could've been a gag gift. No big deal, right? Well, it was from a fourth grade girl, who is now going to be a senior in high school.

It was all a mistake. She accidentally grabbed the wrong gift off the kitchen counter and mistook it as being for me. Behind closed doors, I actually posed for a picture while holding up the lingerie. That was before we (teachers) knew what had really happened. At that time, I thought it was a gift for my girlfriend, who is now my wife. It wasn't. Like I said, it was an innocent mistake but it makes a good story. How did this all unravel? The girl gave me the gift on Friday and we didn't have school again until Tuesday. So she had to live with that mistake haunting her for a long weekend. On Tuesday morning, she walked toward me while grinning and said, "Mr. Wymer, I messed up your gift."

So who was the lingerie for? After speaking to the girl's parents, who thought the whole thing was hilarious, I found out it was supposed to be for another mom in the class, some kind of gag gift from the girl's mom. Yeah, right.

Over the last decade or so, I've gotten many random gifts and several nice ones. This year I received one of my all-time favorites. It's pictured at the top. A coffee mug covered with Shakespearean insults. The odd thing about the gift is that an extremely shy girl gave it to me during the last week of school. I mean EXTREMELY shy. Like this girl speaks about a half-notch above a whisper. And she's the most polite person ever.

What makes this gift so great? When we read A Midsummer Night's Dream, we study the language and words used in Shakespeare's time, especially insults. Who wouldn't? We also play a game where students get to stand, one at a time, and fire off Shakespearean insults at me. Of course, I fire them right back.

Fun stuff. Great gift. Now I can drink coffee in the morning and say things like, "You're a lump of foul deformity" and "You're a clod of wayward marl."