Looking for gifts that tell a family’s stories
Project Heirloom saves treasures in words, photos
Balancing Act
I’ve given my kids dozens upon dozens of gifts over the course of their lives, and I can count on a single hand the ones I remember.
The talking baby doll my daughter wanted more than oxygen itself when she was 4 — that one stands out. I searched for it high and low and found it, finally, during a trip to New York. She named it Talking Baby Doll. I programmed it wrong, so it spoke mostly French. J’ai faim!
My son wears the throwback Dallas Cowboys regulation-size helmet I bought him everywhere he goes, except to bed. (He’d wear it there too if he could find a way to eat a bedtime snack through the face mask.)
Mostly, though, I forget the gifts I give them a few months (weeks?) after they’ve opened them. I’m afraid they do too.
So when we started brainstorming suggestions for this year’s gift guide, I found my mind wandering to ideas less ephemeral. Less mass-produced. Less forgettable. My friend Elaine Melko, a breathtakingly talented photographer and artist, has just teamed up with award-winning author Frances de Pontes Peebles (“The Seamstress”) to launch Project Heirloom, a project that documents American families and what they treasure.
The two women ask people to select heirlooms that hold great meaning to them. Melko shoots photos of them holding the heirlooms, and Peebles interviews them about the stories behind the objects.
“It might be a quilt or a diploma or a photo,” said Peebles, who was born in Brazil. “One woman brought a shirt her mother hand-embroidered in Romania. The point isn’t necessarily the material thing, but the emotional connection to the material thing.”
Melko, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, had the idea for the project when she found a dress that her grandmother used to dance in when she was a young woman in Ukraine. Melko dressed her 6-year-old daughter in the dress one day for a photo shoot.
“It made me think about how this is such a crucial time to remember we’re all from somewhere else,” Melko said. “That’s such a big part of everyone’s story.”
Her own parents, Melko said, have started to wrap up some of their treasured possessions to give to her and her sister as gifts — jewelry from her mom; Ukrainian eggs from her dad.
“It’s such a nice thing to open up something that’s meant a lot to them,” Melko said.
Too often, heirlooms aren’t considered for distribution — or discussion — until death necessitates. I like this way better.
“We live in a time where we have so many choices and so many things and so many disposable things,” Peebles said. “I can buy this shirt for $20 and feel good in it, but is that something that’s going to last the test of time?
“I think we’re craving things that are imbued with this sense of the past, that connect us to our past and where we came from,” she continues. “There’s so much rootlessness — we move, we don’t have a hometown, we don’t have a set group of people. In some ways, that’s great, but in other ways, it can make us feel a little lost.”
One of the subjects they profiled is a woman named Aga. She was born in Poland in 1971, but her family is originally from Lithuania. In 1945, when the Soviet Union took over Lithuania, her family settled eight hours away in Poland.
“When you are forced to go somewhere and start your new life, you know that you are leaving everything permanently and you will never have it back,” Aga told Peebles. “So objects are very important because they are symbols of your past, of your family past.”
In one of the photos, Aga holds a rag doll. Her mom, she said, never owned a doll — her family was too poor to buy toys. So Aga likes to imagine the rag doll as the one her mother would have loved and played with if she could have.
“It belongs to my mother,” she said, “but only in a metaphorical sense.”
Melko gives the families copies of the photos she shoots, which themselves become heirlooms. She and Peebles don’t make any money on the project. It’s simply a labor of love.
“It does make me think differently about gift-giving,” Peebles said. “I start to think, ‘How can I create a connection with this gift and give it emotional significance that going out in a frenzy to Target wouldn’t create?’”
Someday they’d like to turn the project into a book — mostly because the launch party would be so much fun.
“All the families could meet each other,” Melko said. “Everyone could cook their favorite dishes.”
Sounds a lot like the holidays — the heart of them, anyway.
I’m determined to make sure the holidays don’t become a blur of wrapping paper and gift receipts and batteries this year.
I’m inspired by Melko and Peebles to think about my family’s story and to spend more time asking the people who’ve woven that story to narrate their roles to me.
And I’m inspired to think about the connection — not just the reaction — I want my gifts to create.