My (now ex-)girlfriend and I were going through a rough time during this past holiday season. The previous summer, we found out pretty quickly that both of us are abhorrently awful at managing long distance relationships. We bounced back from that perfectly, but leading up to the holidays we each started to grapple with the knowledge that I'd be graduating from university soon (in April) while she still had a couple years left. It was the kind of slow car crash scenario that just slowly pulled us apart. During that holiday break, I travelled out west to visit from friends and family. In just 10 days apart, things already started getting unduly difficult between us. After I got back from my trip, she came to visit. I wanted to do something to show her how special she was to me, even through the difficult times. So I made her a set of six homemade glass jar candles. Each was inspired by a different memory of our time together. Six different colours, with six different custom essential oil blends, with a label I had made with semi-transparent pictures from each memory laid as the background, and a description reminiscing about that memory. A whitewater rafting trip, a picnic by the river near my apartment, the she surprised me at one of my away games, etc. I wasn't expecting anything even remotely like this in return, let me make that clear. The whole thing was admittedly a bit of an emotional hail mary and, I don' know, maybe unfairly heavy-handed considering the tenuous situation we were in? I don't even know anymore. But she handed me my gift and it was a tuque. A plain black wool tuque. Open your closet and pull out the first tuque you see. That tuque. The worst part is that she got me it because the tuque I normally wore - a fluorescent orange wool tuque in perfectly fine condition, a tuque she knew that I loved - she always hated. By the end of her visit, we decided to end things (no, I didn't break up with my girlfriend over a tuque) and I had to beg her to take the candles with her so I didn't have to look at them.