Gift Certificate: Fill & Download for Free

My dad, no matter what we would get him, would unwrap it, grunt a “how nice” or something similar, and throw the gift aside. He just didn’t care.After awhile, family members stopped trying to please him. They’d give him gift certificates.After he died in 2009 and I started clearing up his things in the condo, I went into the desk that was in his bedroom, and in one of the drawers I found gift certificates, most of them in the original envelopes with cards from the givers.Hundreds of dollars of gift certificates, some dating back to the 1970’s, some for places like Wherehouse Records and Pickwick Books that no longer existed.What really angered me was that some of the gift certificates were gifts from ME, given at a time when I was barely getting by financially. Some of them were from my younger brothers, from a time when scraping together $10 to buy a gift certificate was a real sacrifice.My mother would have been ecstatic to have had some of those gift certificates. But he wouldn’t let her, he just shoved them in the desk drawer.I went through the certificates, and the ones that were still valid were split among me and my brothers. About half of them were no longer valid.It still makes me both sad and angry. People were trying to please him, to make him happy, and he just didn’t give a damn. Not even enough to tell people to stop getting him gift certificates, he didn’t want to use them.”Ungrateful” is perhaps not a strong enough word to describe it.

A gift certificate from the local chamber of commerce. It bounced.

“You guys look rough, here’s 50 dollars in gift certificates.”I didn’t know I was homeless at the time. It was 2008 and I had recently left graduate school. I didn’t have a permanent place to sleep or a job, but I had a college degree. I couldn’t possibly be homeless.Having no job and no home means you spend more time outside hanging out. What else are you going to do?I was hanging out with another guy who was in a similar situation when two older homeless men who knew how things worked walked by. We smiled and waved at them. My hair must have been especially unkempt that day or something. So they came over.“How much money you got brother?” - one of them asked.“I dunno, ten bucks I think.” - I told them honestly.Both of them dug out the gift certificates they’d just gotten from the shelter and gave them to us. I had food that week.