It Is Better to Give: A Brief Guide to Gifting
posted 11/16/2006
'Tis the Season, and by now you may be in the throes of the annual shopping agony that is the essence of holiday gift-giving. I don't know your loved ones (unless you're shopping for me, and you should...you really should), so I can't offer the sort of personalized advice that would allow me to say, "See page 32 of the Nieman's catalogue. I know that Scott would LOVE a personal submarine!"
I am, however, marginally qualified to suggest valuable guidelines that may result in a fond gaze from your recipient, and, perhaps, genuine delight. It's an imprecise art, but a giver can increase the odds of his or her gift being happily received by avoiding the following common mistakes:
1. Don't take your girlfriend/boyfriend along when you go shopping for your fiancé/husband/wife/life partner.
My own experience with this sort of egregious miscalculation occurred when I opened my Christmas present and pulled out a sequined evening jacket so glitzy that Mariachi bands would shield their eyes. And it was in a size 2. I am not a size 2...I am several even numbers upwards of a size 2. When I looked at my beloved with bafflement, he confessed that he had been out shopping with another woman and "Tanya LOVED it!" Yeah, I bet she did.
2. Provide for the response.
Anyone receiving a gift must make a response of some sort beyond a simple thank you. The receiver must be able to offer a few enthusiastic words like:
"I’ve never seen one like this!"
"I have been wanting an origami instruction kit for a long time!"
"I hear this is a great book about Neanderthals!"
"You know how I love carnivorous plants!"
"This will be so much fun after the kids are in bed!"
To illicit this sort of a response, the giver must, at the very least, offer a gift that can leave a conversational space for a quasi-sincere response. It’s just cruel to give someone a gift so void of any possible interest that the giftee is left speechless or struggling..."Wow. A bulletin board. This will really come in handy!"
For example, my friend, Jane, was married to a marriage therapist. One would have thought that a Ph.D in this sort of thing would have prevented Dave from making the classic error of giving his wife a deli-style electric meat slicer for Christmas.
Ah, no. Jane didn’t bother to comment, nor did she open the box once the wrapping paper was off. She walked directly to the curb and set it there with a sign, "Free to a Good Home."
3. It is NOT better to make your gifts unless you’re really good at it.
This is the moment for genuine and honest self-reflection. Are you REALLY an artist? Do you have a skill at making something that most people do not have? Or did you buy a BeDazzler and now you have bedazzled GIFTS FOR EVERYONE!
I advise doing a test run. Make one, single gift in the art or craft of your calling...say, a plywood painted whirly-gig of the little Holly Hobby figure tilting a watering can when the wind blows. Give it to someone. If they say in a desperate sort of tone (as if they didn’t already know the answer), "Oh, did you make this yourself?" stop right there. Do not make 150 more.
Alternatively, if you make a friend a quilted and hand painted wall-hanging and they gasp, "I know exactly where this is going!" – meaning their living room wall and NOT under their pregnant Pekinese, you may continue to give away the fruits of your creative labor.
4. Never, for one moment, try to escape shopping altogether by claiming you couldn’t find anything to buy.
Yes, everyone knows that stores are running out of consumer gifts. There are no books, or magazine subscriptions, or liquor or boxes with fruits treated with anabolic steroids to be found. One cannot locate CDs, or sweaters or fine soaps or earrings or orchids or fluffy socks anywhere. Leather goods and electronics have virtually disappeared, and you couldn’t think of a single charity worthy of receiving a donation in your beloved’s name. What’s a giver to do?
You’ve got some BIG jingle bells if you mean to go down that road.
5. Do NOT coordinate your gift with your pet.
You wouldn’t think I need to mention something so obvious, but I am writing from personal experience. One Christmas morning, I opened the premier gift from my ex-husband (note the "ex" part) to find a short, men’s grey terry cloth robe. It was very, very ugly and the kind that men wear to absorb spilled coffee and food crumbs when they spend too many hours in their recliners.
As I held out the offending object and worked up a hostile glare, my ex defended his choice, "What? You don’t like it? It’s the same color as the cat!"
I don’t know in what universe a woman would want to coordinate her clothing with her pets. I never wore it, but the cat seemed to like it. When he died years later (the cat, not the husband) I buried him wrapped up in it, both as a symbolic gesture of my love for him and my complete loathing of the robe.
6. Re-gifters, exercise caution!
There is nothing inherently wrong with passing along a gift that is better suited to someone else than it was to you. But if you are going to re-gift a present, you should make some effort to remember from whom you got the gift in the first place, or if the re-giftee would have reason to know its original source.
I once went shopping with a friend to a nice department store. She made a purchase at the cosmetic counter that entitled her to a fancy-schmansy FREE cosmetic gift set (valued at $13,500). My friend is raven haired with very dark eyes and bronze skin. The makeup was formulated to match her coloring. I am reddish-blondish.
When my friend gave me the unopened gift set for Christmas later in the year, I was trapped like a chipmunk at the bottom of a bucket. I had nothing to say. Into the excruciating silence that followed, my friend interjected, "Hey...it’s new! I haven’t used any of it!"
You can see what went wrong. Not only was I present when she acquired the gift for free, I could never actually use the gift unless I spent twenty hours a day on a tanning bed and started wearing brown contacts. My only option was to make a mental run-through of all of my OTHER brunette girl friends and re-re-gift.
7. When in doubt, buy a bowl.
It’s probably a womb-thing and I’m sure that ethnologies on the subject abound, but women are completely mad for vessels. We all jones for lovely bowls, hand-woven baskets, colorful clay pots and graceful vases.
I don’t know what we’re trying to contain (other than our disappointment, still festering, over the bathrobe incident in ’87), but we have a high regard for round-ish concave things that hold other stuff. If you don’t give us bowls, we go out and give bowls to each other. Along with candles and cute sox and hand cream.
8. Jewelry...potential risks.
Unless you are a jeweler yourself, buying jewelry for a woman is very risky. Buy her something from an estate sale, and she may be upset to wear something that once belonged to a deceased person. Buy her something new, and you have missed the cornerstone of her whole persona – that she was a Victorian Studies major in college and adores jewelry from the late 19nth century.
If it’s too elaborate, you might have been insensitive to the fact that she is a natural sort of woman who prefers river pebbles to rubies. If it’s less than three karats, you may be guilty of not valuing her enough to take out an equity loan to buy that brilliant cut.
You would be wise to consult your beloved’s close friend and take her along shopping. Caveat: as long as you aren’t dating her, too (see Guideline #1).
If you are buying jewelry for a man, heavy gold pieces showing Playboy bunny ears are always well-received.
9. Electronics, gadgets and manure...men only, except for cameras.
Most women consider electronics and gadgets to be useful necessities, but you will be hard put to find a woman genuinely delighted by the key ring/laser pointer or that hammer you keep in your car to break through glass in the event that you are trapped inside. The exception to this is a camera...we like cameras and you may go out and buy us very expensive camera equipment. That is acceptable.
My friend, Anna, once received a whole yard full of commercial organic compost as a gift from her then-husband. I wondered, at that point, if the magic was gone from their marriage and if a really excellent late summer tomato crop could replace it.
It turned out that manure and tomatoes have virtually no erotic potential. I advise against giving anything this organic.
10. Yes, you are morally superior, and no, no one admires you for it.
I understand that you detest the commercialism of the holidays and fervently believe that giving gifts is not a true representation of your deeper feelings. Enjoy this December, because by next year you will be alone when you curse the Gods of Materialism.
11. Mugs.
No.
I hope that this has been somewhat helpful and that your loved ones will appreciate that you've made an effort to improve your remedial gifting skills. It is not now, nor has it ever been true, that anyone believes that "it's the thought that counts" when absolutely no thought has been put into the gift in the first place.
You may send me a bowl. Or a personal submarine.
Note-to-Self #2: My sincere apologies to anyone who tried to find the site for McSweeney's List based on my glowing endorsement of it in the previous article. I did not include the correct address, and you would have been really challenged to find it on your own. If you still have a mind to throw away hours of time, go to www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/ , and let me know what you post since these lists seem to fulfill some sort of obsessive need I have to compile.
Note-to-Self #3: On a serious note-to-self...if you drive along any neighborhood on a weekend, you will see several garage doors open. If you pause, you will see that many of these garages are filled to overflowing with mountains of surplus stuff. Quite a few of us have enough extra possessions that we could furnish and decorate a second and third home beyond the ones in which we are living.
Don't get me wrong – I love stuff and have spent a small fortune just moving my stuff and storing the excess I don't actually use. But, we're heading into Stuff Acquisition Season and I'd like to offer one more shopping tip.
If most of your heart's desires have been met and you and your loved ones have run out of room for more stuff, please consider the happy glow-on you can achieve by making a small (or monster) donation to a good cause as a gift. For example, just a few bucks to Etta Projects (the cost of a handful of CDs), a Washington state non-profit organization, can provide a Bolivian child a meal per day for an entire year.
Plenty of needy people, homeless pets and medical research programs will benefit from your savvy gifting skills, and you won't be asking yourself in six months, "Is there room in the garage for the AbLounger?"
Be the change that you'd like to see in the world...and all that.
Previous column
Next column
© 2008 Ingrid Gabriel
Ingrid is currently living and respectably employed in Austin, Texas with a firm specializing in environmental law. She hopes to get back home to the San Juan Islands next spring to stay.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."
Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com
|
