Random Saturday - Purple and green

If you expect something about color coordination in art or fashion, you're wrong, sorry. This is just another post about memories which is inspired by a post written by Nicole from Huisvlijt, "Kringloop Tristesse".
I don't speak Dutch, but from the Firefox translation I get it's about a water can that a school class gave to a teacher and it ended up in a thrift shop still with that tag on.
No idea how it is in other countries, but in my time gifts for teachers were not a big thing, at least not in my school. So I asked a teacher I know how it is today, and he too said that it happens, but not often.

We had one teacher, however, who got several gifts from part of the class, and that was a running joke.
One of my classmates loved the color purple and wore it a lot and said teacher didn't like purple. I don't know what the exact reason was, but he once told my classmate jokingly that purple wasn't a color, but a punishment.
So of course our whole row decided to give him something purple. My friend was a former baker's daughter and good at baking herself - how I loved her Christmas cookies! - and suggested a marble cake, but with purple and pink food dye. It was a big hit (I have no idea if our teacher ate any of it, though).
Anyhow, from then on, he always got something purple at the end of the school year. Nothing big of course, just to keep the joke alive, and we always tried to make it something useful or consumable, so it wouldn't take up unnecessary space.

One year, another teacher said jokingly how much we "spoiled" him (they had become a couple although we didn't know it yet at the time) and another friend of mine told her to pick a color. She said green. That friend did macrame and knitted socks like crazy - it was the 80s and a lot of pupils knitted in class - so she made a beautiful pair of green socks as a Christmas gift, much to our teacher's surprise but also delight.
So from then on we had to get something purple and something green.

Picture by Konevi via pxhere

I even kept the tradition running for several years after leaving school. A lot of my school friends left town to work elsewhere or study, but I lived at home during training as a librarian and my teachers didn't live far from me.
One time, my teacher handed me a little parcel saying "ok, so sometimes purple can be beautiful if it's on the right thing".
It was a framed picture of a purple Porsche (he had a vintage one himself, not purple but red). I don't know if I still have that picture somewhere, but I remember it really made me laugh back then.

Picture by Alex Ifti via Unsplash

So yeah, that's my little story of an "apple for the teacher".
Is it common for children to give their teachers a gift where you are?