I'm taking this to mean best Christmas gift ever given, rather than best gift of any kind ever given, but must admit that I'm struggling to remember very many of them in that case. I can only hope my presents have been slightly more memorable for the recipients!

I did give one gift last year which went down very well, though, and that was a clear plastic tube containing a stack of six different-coloured toy bath ducks for Eloise. It was only something I grabbed on a whim while in the queue for the tills in the Kirkstall branch of Dunnes Stores, because it looked brightly-coloured and exciting, and also included one purple and one black duck, so was a good excuse to sneakily start training up my new niece in the ways of Gothdom. ;-) But she has had so much fun out of them.

A couple of times since I gave them to her, I have been lucky enough to sit in on the bath-time ritual and watch her playing with them, and looking back over what type of play she has used them for during the last year tells a small but distinct story about how she has grown and changed since last Christmas. When she first got them, she was only about 6 months old, so she mainly liked to wave them about, bashing them on the side of her little baby bath and occasionally sucking on them. But already by this August, at the age of about one-and-a-third years, she was more into trying to line them up neatly along the side of the bath, and picking them up again with great concern if they fell down. Apparently, more recently she has become a bit of a nightmare about undertaking bath-time at all, but thankfully I have been spared witnessing that!

As it happens, she also got very into ducks generally not long after I had given them to her, and in fact one of the first words she could securely say, at approaching the age of one, was 'duck'. She didn't enunciate the final consonant sound very distinctly, but from context that was very definitely what she was saying. What I found really amazing when she started this was that she would say it whether in the park looking at a real duck, at home looking at a picture in a book, or in the bath playing with the toy ducks - despite a huge range in colour, appearance and realism across the different contexts. I really didn't expect a baby who was under a year old to be able to recognise such disparate items as belonging to the same category, even with adult prompting and affirmation, and it was an incredible insight into the capacities of the human brain for me to realise that she could.

Anyway, babies and young children are very easy to please with presents, so having Eloise around should hopefully guarantee a good few more years of Christmas present hits. Apparently this year, she is all about elephants, helicopters and action play-sets which she can take pieces in and out of. So I guess the ideal present would be a toy helicopter with removable elephant pilots? Well, it's a bit unlikely, isn't it, but I'll see what I can do!

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