The Season of Gifting

When some of us sit down to make New Year’s resolutions, it’s fair to say that cutting back on spending will be a popular choice, if circumstances haven’t already forced that on us.

In our family, we make a pre-holiday resolution to have a “little Christmas,” meaning, we’re going to cut way back on gift-giving, though we never quite make it. True, we did spend less this year, but that was largely because stuff cost less, as the merchants were desperate. A big thanks to Amazon for the free shipping.

A lot of the spending has to do with annual gift-giving to other branches of the family. Some may say this is wasteful and the result of false obligation, but there is something to be said for tradition. At least, if you’re going to cut people off after umpteen years, you owe them an explanation. Sometimes you don’t even know that you have a family until you get their boxes of pears or whatever.

For me, the wrapping of the gifts is the hard part. This time I will hear from the green freaks who will complain about the waste generation and damage to the environment. Nevertheless, wrapping is important to us, so much so that I almost feel as if we’re grading each other. Paper selection, 9.1; color coordination, 8.7; Scotch tape use, 7.3; degree of difficulty, 5.9. My wife and I work as a production team. She hates working with paper and I hate ribbons and bows, so we divide up the work.

I must say there are few things more satisfying than finding exactly the right gift for someone, when you know they need it or crave it, even if it costs a little more. For the others, there is always the gift card, if you defeat the cop-out feeling.

But gifts don’t always have the expected effect. A friend’s little girl, who is just over a year old, was showered with gifts, including a teddy bear and such. But what most interested her was the wrapping, not the gifts themselves.

If your experience as a giver or receiver or both was less than perfect, well, there’s always next year’s holiday season. And birthdays are pretty good practice in between.

There, now I’ve said it.