As I head into next year to serve the Lodge again as WM, part of the planning naturally includes gifts and gimme’s. It is tradition that on the night of the Official Visitation, that is, when all the other Lodges in the district visit your Lodge along with the District Deputy, that you welcome them and present your contemporaries with a gift, or small token of your esteem and appreciation for them visiting. One unique idea was from Bro. William L. Herz of Union Lodge No. 479 who presented an imprinted baseball with his name and Masonic logo on a home-made stand and autographed by all the officers in the lodge – that was a uniques gift!
We also celebrate what are called “Masonic Birthdays” – when we formally recognize the month that a brother came into the Fraternity. There’s usually a token gift involved with that recognition as well. In bygone times (i.e. my first time around - 20 years ago) the gifts for “Birthday boys” was a choice of a cigar or a candy bar. This year – they get a candy bar. Not the big attraction it was when we first started recognizing birthdays. Many a Master orders advertising specialties – keychains, ice scrapers, pens etc. to give out.
As is also tradition, the officers pay for these gifts out of their own pockets, as it is their year and not fair to use up Lodge funds for such niceties (though we did have some WM’s in the past who submitted receipts to the Lodge for the gifts they gave out – WRONG!)
Well, as you probably know, I am currently sans-employment (out of work), so I thought about what gifts I could give on my self-imposed shoestring budget. So I turned to a hobby of mine for the solution. You see, I like working with wood – woodcarving, woodburning, wooden crafts, refinishing/repurposing furniture – those sorts of things. So in my spare time, when not sending resumes, applying for jobs on-line, or reading rejection letters, I grabbed some wood and took to the scroll saw, the carving knife and the wood-burner.
I started with the Birthday gifts (as I assume I’ll need more of those) – made about 50 of them for starters, each will be personally signed by the JW,SW and WM (me). They look something like this:
Next I took to making the gifts for Visitation. I got the inspiration from a Halloween wall-hanging we picked up at a craft show a few years back – kind of a country craft-style Frankenstein. I basically used the same dimensions and with a little artistic twist, created nine country craft-style Worshipful Masters. Each one has the Lodge number on the front to represent the Master of each visiting Master’s Lodge number. Once I had them assembled, I had no place to store them (until next April), so I rigged it so I could hang them all up in the basement. The basement now looks like this:
I hope the months pass quickly, because these little guys are beginning to freak out my wife just a bit when she goes down to do laundry. I can’t wait for her reaction to the 4 foot free-standing version I’m making now for the District Deputy.
I also used the woodburner to recreate the District Deputy’s jewel on a piece of wood. It started as an experiment, but turned out okay, so I’ll probably give him this too:
And that’s about it for the gift items…on a shoestring budget, doing something I enjoy so the time flies by, not difficult to make. But I also made these things “just for so” as we say here in PA Dutch country:
Well, that’s what I do for fun – I sure hope the Brethren like ‘em. My wife said “I hope they appreciate this after the time you put into it!” I’d be doing something like this to relieve stress and have fun anyway even if it wasn’t for my Lodge Brethren….but, me too dear.















