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Gifts Near And Deer

OC personalities tell of the Christmas presents they've most cherished

Gifts Near And Deer
This mount is special to Lee Lakosky in a number of ways. (Courtesy The Crush)

In this season of giving, we asked a selection of Outdoor Channel personalities to tell us about the best gift they’ve ever received.

What they told us ranged from a specific product they found invaluable in the wild, to a weapon that holds special meaning to a childhood item. But Lee Lakosky of the Crush simply blew us away.

Lakosky tells us about an old whitetail mount that hung in his grandparents’ basement in northern Minnesota.

“As a kid every time we went up to visit the first thing I would do is run downstairs and gaze at it for hours! From the time I was 3 and got my first toy gun that whitetail mount was the quarry of thousands of hunts by a young Lee Lakosky. I've shot that buck with my toy guns over 47,000 times!”

He said it was what began his obsession with whitetails. Then when his grandparents passed and his mother and her six siblings were dividing the estate, 17-year-old Lee bypassed asking her to request for the numerous guns, boats and fishing equipment his grandfather possessed, instead begging his mother for the deer head.

“I couldn't believe it when my parents came home with it; my efforts had paid off and it was mine!!” he said. “The only problem was that by this time the mount was more than 100 years old and one of the ears and most of its nose had been broken off but still, it was the memories of this buck that mattered the most.”


Click the image for Lee's gift and the special presents other personalities cherish. Click to the end as the finale is a coal-to-diamond romance.

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