At the end of a cold, wet session last Christmas Eve, a singing pickle showed up with one instruction: regift it immediately.
Don’t trust this gift. Don’t keep this gift. Like the curse in that horror movie It Follows, it must passed on — preferably to the kindest, most unsuspecting sucker you could find.
It went to Ray and Tracy.
Ray passed it to Richard and Soussan, who took it out for lunch—in public!—with Sunny.
The Singing Christmas Pickleball moved from one session to the next. One person to another. Slipped into backpacks. Handed off quietly at the end of a drill. Tucked under arms. Photos were posted in each sessions’s WhatsApp chat.
And then something peculiar began to happen.
The Singing Christmas Pickle began to reveal small glimpses into the lives of people you only knew from across the net.
Their kitchen tiles. Their gardens. Their local cafés.
It befriended all the city’s pickleball dogs. (Cats, of course, still knew better.) It went to boozy brunches on Granville Island and big Lunar New Year family feasts. It accompanied Randy to work in the studio. It helped Sergio design games. It rode on tractors and skis and bikes and quads and learned to play piano. It went to art openings. It crossed Burrard Inlet in an outrigger canoe. It travelled to courts all over the province.
The obnoxious Singing Christmas Pickleball was no longer given as a curse, but as a quiet reward — for someone who made your session extra special that day. Or, sometimes, to someone who just looked like they needed it.
And it travelled!
In a future post, we’ll tell you about all the places and things it saw this year. We’ll tell you about its pronouns. We’ll tell you about our sixteen-year-old coach Joshua’s Battle of Pickle vs Droids. We’ll tell you about the strange wardrobe of clothes people made.
This Christmas, it found its way back from Baja’s rugged East Cape to Mount Pleasant Community Centre, turning up at a Jamboree fundraiser for the food bank. Of course that’s where it turned up. And, of course, Erin awarded it to Coach Angie.
And so in the great week of regifting between Christmas and New Year, the cycle will begin anew.
You can follow The Singing Christmas Pickle’s adventures on Jamboree Instagram—or share your own photos if you see it in the wild.
Safe travels!
-The Pickleball Jamboree
