Graduation Gift

When my parents have the money, which will be when they finish paying off my college tuition (sometime in the next month), they have promised me a college graduation gift.  I have picked out a special pair of Sabbath and holiday candlesticks from...you guessed it...the Yair Emanuel site (emanuel-judaica.com).

I do have candlesticks that I am using right now, but they are the ones I have been using since I was a little girl.  Here is a picture:

I want a pair that I have chosen using my adult tastes.  The pair I have picked out is brushed metal (like the purple handwashing cup I bought with babysitting money this past Summer), and they are pink.  I would have preferred purple, I think (everything should be purple!), but this candlestick style does not come in purple.

What makes this pair of candlesticks so expensive is not so much the cost of the candlesticks themselves (39 dollars), although I definitely do not have that much money to throw around right now, but the cost of shipping from Israel (where the Yair Emanuel company is based), which on a three-dimensional object (meaning not a kippah) will nearly double, if not actually double, the price.  However, for a college graduation gift, my parents have said it is OK to spend that much.

I had wanted to get the candlesticks before I moved, to sort of double as a housewarming gift, but I understand that money is money.  My family is not doing so well right now (my mother, a psychiatrist, is  making a lot; my father, however, as an Army colonel in the Reserves, is barely working) and I want them to prioritize paying off college so my official transcript can be released and sent to Rabbinical schools.  It is the last piece of my application, and it is already over two weeks late.

That's all for now! Later today I am meeting up with a friend whom I haven't seen in a while.  She works in downtown Manhattan, and I will take the subway alone for the first time ever (well, the New York subway, anyway; I've done it in Boston) to  meet up with her on her lunch hour. 

I promise to post a picture of my new candlesticks when I get them.  Perhaps I'll take the picture right before I use them the first time, so they have Sabbath candles in them, and post it after the Sabbath.  I like that idea.  Unless they get here on a Monday or something, and I don't want to wait that long.  Then I will just open them, set them up on the cloth I use under my candles (and, now that I am  lighting real candles, with a piece of aluminum foil under the candlesticks and on top of the cloth, so nothing catches fire), and take pictures.