MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE HOSTESS GIFT

My friend Paula brought me a hostess gift this Thanksgiving, but for some reason, refused to bring it into the house until after all our other guests had left. I wish you could have seen her hubby Tim standing in our doorway, holding this gorgeous, all-but-empty pot in one hand, and a big ol' wad of broken poinsettia branches in the other. We haven't laughed that hard in weeks! Paula said "I swear, it was the biggest, most gorgeous plant you ever saw when we left the house this morning!"

I understood perfectly. I unpacked and displayed many a shipment of these fragile beauties in my years at the nursery, and I know from experience, all you have to do is look at them wrong, for those branches to start snapping off!

To tell you the truth, I'm kind of glad it happened. If I just had your normal-looking poinsettia sitting there on my counter, I would have got so used to it being there after a while that I'd stop really seeing it. But this little Charlie Brown poinsettia? Why, it gives me a whopper of a belly laugh each time I pass it, 'cause I can't help but picture Tim standing there with all those branches in his hand!

Besides, I would have gone bonkers over this pot if they had handed it to me dead empty. Do those colors scream "BECKY!" or what?