By Felicia Teiken

Special to the Forum

This past week my best friend and roommate celebrated her 27th year of life by turning 28! I love birthdays and honestly think it’s whack that we only get one each year. Birthdays are a great excuse to make the people you love feel seen and heard and celebrated.

When you think of birthdays, gifts probably come to mind shortly after. I struggled with deciding on a gift for her and didn’t make the decision until the last possible second. I decided to get her a Chappell Roan Vinyl (go listen to Pink Pony Club or California if you haven’t already heard them) and some chapsticks from Trader Joe’s. Since moving in with her, I’ve rediscovered my creative side—especially my love for arts and crafts.

In school, I would get pretty discouraged in art class because I’d compare my art to my far more creative friends or even worse, my very talented art teacher. As an adult, I have no one to compare myself to and I’m not being graded which has made me find joy in being creative, so along with her new vinyl and chapstick, was a purple poster-card. Written in my wonky uneven handwriting at the top of the page “28 things I love about you:”

The vinyl wasn’t a mystery, I didn’t wrap it and just left it in the brown paper bag. But when she pulled out the poster card, her face lit up. “OH! This is gonna be the best part,” she said with her eyes starting to glisten. She read the list out loud  to everyone at the dinner table.

She laughed at a few but was smiling through them all.

I used paper, markers, and an hour of my time. I came up with 28 things that I adore, admire, or appreciate about her and wrote them in list form. These are some of my favorites from my list:

1. The amount of passion your heart holds. -Girlfriend has a lot of passion/passions!!

18. You peel my oranges. I didn’t really eat oranges before moving out here. I thought it was the taste but I think it was mostly because I hate peeling them. When I arrived last year, the orange season was in full swing. After long days, we’d go for walks and she’d pick the oranges straight from the trees. She’d peel one, hand me half, and we’d carry on the conversations about how the world keeps changing and how we planned to keep changing the world.

26. We get to keep celebrating birthdays together all over the world. The first birthday we got to celebrate together was Allison’s 22nd birthday in Lesotho, which is where we met while in the Peace Corps. We flew out to Las Vegas for my 26th birthday and now both of us have spent a birthday together in LA. I’m excited to see where we celebrate at 50!

I know finances are tight for a lot of us right now and quite frankly I don’t see them getting better for many of us. With the holidays right around the corner, I’d encourage you to make some of your gifts this year. Get creative! Crafting doesn’t have to be perfect – in fact, I bet your brother won’t even notice that your lines aren’t straight. Cut out some snowflakes and add family photos to them, paint something small, or make the quirky list of all the reasons you love someone. It’s the handmade gifts that stick with people and in 20 years when Allison stumbles across that poster-card she’ll likely laugh and cry and relive that moment at the dinner table all over again. As for the chapstick, I’m sure it will be long gone by next month.