Every generation has one. The Book Aunt. The person you can always count on to send you fascinating things to read at Christmas and your birthday, with the corners of the dust covers cut off so that you can’t see the price, and a warm message scrawled in peacock blue ink on the inside cover.

For me, the book aunt is my mother’s younger sister, Patti. For our nephews and nieces the book aunt is…me. And I’m cool with that. Fuzzy’s family is big on reading, though they’ve never really had much exposure to the classics, and my step-brother’s kids are becoming readers as well.

But books seem anticlimactic when compared with iPods and jewelrey and pictures of dead presidents, so I’m wondering if I should do theme boxes… like, when I give my young nephew a copy of The Jungle Book I could throw in some animal print bedding, a copy of the movie, and a box of animal crackers. (As an aside, I love animal crackers.)

Or when we gift a young niece with Black Beauty maybe we could include a horse figurine, a charm for her bracelet, and perhaps donate to her riding lesson fund.

I like theme boxes. I like small presents wrapped with great love. I like making reading something more than words on a page.

This idea has potential.