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Looking for a few suggestions of what might stir up a cooking craze with your favorite college grad? Aloha, and welcome to Amazon Gift Central's blog, v. 2.0. Our inaugural entry showcases a gift-exchange tradition known as the "White Elephant," (also known as "Yankee Swap") made recently infamous by the I asked myself, "Self, how had an elephant, specifically a white one, come to represent impractical, undesirable gifts?" Ask Bart Simpson: elephants make appealing pets. He acquired one in a radio call-in contest (offered a choice between $10K in cash and a live elephant, Bart opted for the elephant, stunning the DJs at KBBL Springfield). Bart declared "I think I'll name him Stampy," after cheerfully watching his new charge flatten several garbage cans and all the Simpsons' backyard foliage.

Answering the etymological question therefore requires a quick trip to the Wayback Machine. The most famous white elephant given was to the emperor Charlemagne in 798, when:

[H]istorical forces had elevated to the thrones of those empires three rulers whose destinies were already interwoven with past events: Harun al-Rashid, later the fabled caliph of The Thousand and One Nights; Irene, Empress of Byzantium, and Charlemagne--Charles the Great--ruler of the kingdom of the people known as Franks. Harun al-Rashid sent several generous gifts to the latter tyrant (history seems silent on whether Irene got anything, possibly a food dehydrator). Among them was an ingenious clock:

... a marvellous mechanical contraption, in which the course of the twelve hours moved according to a water clock, with as many brazen little balls, which fell down on the hour and through their fall made a cymbal ring underneath. On this clock there were also twelve horsemen who at the end of each hour stepped out of twelve windows, closing the previously open windows by their movements.

For Charlemagne, this extraordinary object must have represented learning and progress, much as a Model T Ford did in an isolated town in the early twentieth century. The clock, however, was modest by comparison with more Harun's fabled present to his Frankish peer.

What was that fabled present? Abul-Abbas, a lovely white elephant, whom Charlemagne afterward occasionally rode around while quelling insurrections, because nothing strikes terror into the heart of a ninth-century rebel like a giant pachyderm. Abul-Abbas was the first elephant to make it north of the Alps; imagine, if you will, how mystical and terrifying such a creature would appear to those who had never seen one.

Again, I was still not seeing the drawbacks to elephants as gifts. I wouldn't mind quelling a few insurrections myself. However, Wikipedia notes:

The animals needed a lot of care and, being sacred, could not be put to work, so were a great financial burden on the recipient--and only the monarch and the very rich could afford them. According to one story, white elephants were sometimes given as a present to some enemy (often a lesser noble with whom the king was displeased). The unfortunate recipient, unable to make any profit from it, and obliged to take care of it, would suffer bankruptcy and ruin.

So there you have it: Harun al-Rashid may have been pulling a fast one on ol' Charlemagne, although I prefer to think he meant well. He did send that cool clock, after all. I'm not sure I can say the same for Spiro Agnew, who famously presented a white elephant to King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, but I don't believe the Nixon administration was known for its upstanding behavior.

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