Woman Says The ‘Embarrassing’ Item Her Mom Forced Her To Give As A Teacher Gift As A Child Is Now Her Go-To Present
It seemed like the worst possible gift as a kid, but now that she's an adult she totally gets it.
fizkes / Shutterstock.com We all know men are hard to buy gifts for, but teachers just might have them beat. What do you even get for someone who gives that much of themselves? Another candle shaped like an apple? Another Starbucks gift card?
But for one woman on TikTok, the "junk" her mom used to make her buy her teachers is now among her favorite things as an adult.
It turns out her mom was on to something.
She shared why embarrassing teacher gifts from her childhood are now her go-to present.
Teachers pretty legendarily tend to get shafted when it comes to Christmas and end-of-year gifts from students. (And don't even get them started on the Teacher Appreciation Day stuff they tend to get!)
TikToker Candi Davis' mom had the whole teacher gift thing on lock — though she definitely didn't get it at the time.
Her mom would give dish towels as teacher gifts, which she found embarrassing as a kid.
"When I was a kid, I thought she was crazy when we needed to give our teachers a gift in elementary school for Christmas or for the end of the year," she said in a recent TikTok.
"You know how people like to give their teachers going away gifts or Christmas gifts or anything like that," she said, "My mom would get dish towels. Wrap up dish towels and go to my teacher."
Dish towels? Yeah, it's not hard to understand why she was embarrassed. "I remember being mortified because all my friends were giving them coffee mugs and… lotions, things that I thought were so nice," Davis said.
"I was mortified like, 'That's so stupid, nobody wants a dish towel," she went on to say. But now that she's gotten older, her perspective has changed and she realizes her mom was on to something with all those dish towels.
High-quality dish towels are now her gift of choice because it's something most of us wouldn't bother spending money on for ourselves.
"Now that I'm a grown woman, I would love if someone brought me a gift of dish towels for my birthday for Christmas, whatever," Davis went on to say, "and I have found myself gifting my female friends dish towels often."
But not just any dish towels — the good-quality, slightly more expensive kind her mom used to give her teachers. "I'm not talking about those thin pretty little tea towels," she said, "I'm talking about the pretty thick, absorbent, sturdy, very useful type of dish towels."
Photo: Studio KIWI / Shutterstock
Why? "Because nobody likes to buy that. Nobody wants to buy that kind of stuff for themselves," she said. And she's kind of on to something, right?
So many of us only buy nice things for others and the cheapest things possible for ourselves.
Davis' TikTok touches on a common phenomenon that's kind of strange when you think about it: So many of us reflexively buy ourselves cheap plastic kitchen utensils and the least expensive coffee maker at Target.
But we'd never give the $15 Mr. Coffee to, say, a bride and groom as a wedding gift. Why is that? We're just as deserving, right?
And most of the time, we enjoy the good stuff more. Those spendy dish towels get the job done better, and they usually last longer. When was the last time you said that about something you bought on Amazon?
I'm reminded of a set of high thread-count sheets I splurged on last year. Sure, they were $200 (on clearance… they were actually $300). But they're so soft I can't bring myself to care — and after sleeping on them every night for a year (they're too soft to swap!) and washing them every weekend they've yet to so much as wrinkle, let alone show any wear.
They'll probably outlive me at this point, and in today's world, where we're awash in cheap goods that last about 15 minutes, that's worth something. And it turns out, what Davis talked about is part of a wider trend.
A 2022 consumer survey found that most people are tired of the Amazonification and "fast fashion" transformation of… well, literally everything we buy. Sixty percent of respondents said they prefer to buy for quality because buying the cheap stuff so often backfires or doesn't last.
So go buy yourself some nice dish towels. As Davis put it, "My mom was right about this," and you're worth it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.