To judge by conversations with friends and acquaintances over the years, my family isn't the only one to treat the gifting of a knife as a rite of passage. It's an acknowledgment that the recipient has passed a milestone, having become sufficiently familiar with spatial relationships and mortality to avoid severing anything too terribly important from themselves or others. It's also the entrusting of a reliable tool, perhaps the most useful one that humans have invented and can own.
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-WiscoDave
