Re-gifting Ruby Slippers.

I am not a re-gifter.  From a young age, my mother practically beat me over the head with that old idiom 'It's the thought that counts,' telling me to smile and say thank you, even when it was obvious that very little thought went into a gift at all.  I remember being thirteen and having to grin and bare it while my mom plopped a pink woolen hat on my head, made by a distant relative who apparently thought I was six.  The hat sat on my dresser until I moved out at twenty-three, partly because it was the right thing to do, but mostly because the risk of incurring my mother's infamous wrath over a piece of seventies throw back knitwear just wasn't worth it.  Carrying this practice into adulthood has left me with a house full of possessions given to me by well-meaning people, i.e people who looked at their rapidly decaying/devaluing treasures and said 'Well, I've been meaning to get rid of this useless crap; Mel will love it.'  In short, I've never been able to say no to a present, much less get rid of it once the former owner was out of sight.  Until last year. 
Anyone who has read an earlier post of mine entitled 'What I left on the ocean floor,' will be familiar with my murky history with Aaron, who was my first boyfriend at the age of twenty-one and whom I carried on a less than desirable relationship with on and off for well over a decade.  This time last year, I was clearing out my wardrobe when I stumbled upon a shoe box.  Not being a subscriber to the Sex and the City inspired belief that a woman can never have too many pairs of shoes, I was taken aback when I saw the designer label on the lid.  The only way a pair of designer shoes would ever make it into this house would be if I went window shopping on Chapel Street after hours armed with a cinder block.  Then I remembered; they were a present from Aaron.  Technically, given his penchant for women in heels, and that he knew I couldn't walk so much as a centimeter in any shoe with a heel higher than a stub, they were a present FOR Aaron.  He had presented them to me like the Wizard of Oz gifting a certain pigtailed girl with her passport home.  But those ruby slippers had only steered me further and further away from where my heart was, and had by now well and truly lost their sparkle.  It was at that moment that I ignored the forced sense of gratitude with which I had been indoctrinated and called my best friend Corrina.
'Are you nuts?' She shrieked. 'Do you have any idea how much a pair of Tony Bianco's costs?'
'Yeah, but they're not me.'
'How much do you want for them?'
'Nothing,' I shrugged. 
The sound of Corrina's heavy breathing made me feel like I was holding a sea shell to my ear.
'I look like a palsy-afflicted whore in the damn things.  You'll get more wear out of them than I ever would.'
A few days later, I passed my ill-gotten foot fashion on to Corrina, who looked as though she might have a brain embolism at any minute. 
'Merry Christmas.'
She took the gift with so much reverence that an outsider would be forgiven for thinking I was handing over the Hope Diamond.  Corrina is the best friend I've ever had.  She has seen me through bad break ups, my son's diagnoses with Asperger Syndrome, and even put her son into after school care so that she could travel for two hours by bus to be with me for my Nan's funeral, so knowing that she would get a lifetime of enjoyment out of something as simple as a pair of Revlon red, six inch stilettos meant the world to me.  It also enabled me to be truly free of anyone else's self-interested idea of the sort of person I should be, and that was my Christmas present to myself.