Mike, about the joy of giving gifts, may I respond here? I also enjoy giving gifts, giving someone important a gift that shows love and thought and care as to giving something "perfect"--i.e., the gift should delight the donee. Don't let your imagination slip away!
For most of the ten years of my marriage, all funds were absorbed by the expenses associated with my husband's Ph.D. studies. (It's a cliche--let it go!) CHRISTMAS??? And we both had large families and very close friends to whom one longs to give a token of the friendship.
I listened like a bat all year to get hints of what might please or interest. (I still do.) And I came up with things that I could afford that would be novel, that might delight. One year, to the people who could buy anything they might choose, I gave a "yummies" package of things like pomegranate sauce, my own pate, cranberry-orange muffins--all things that I had made late at night, after work, after dinner, after washing the dishes, etc. Things they couldn't buy, nor could I have bought for them with a platinum card.
Another year everyone got a lavendar sachets and a selection of herbal vinegars in old glass bottles that I found scrounging in "antique shops." They were vinegars I made with herbs I grew during the summer--opal basil, borage, for example--and vinegars I arrived at the old-fashioned way with "mother" and steeped together for six months. (I should add that I lived in a studio apartment with *no* room but did have access to a sunlit area for growing things.)
What I am trying to illustrate here is that you must use your ingenuity and your talents to come up with something that will please the person to whom you wish to give a gift. Today, thank God, I can afford more, but I still listen like a bat. As I said to one lover who told me that I was spending too much on a gift (to his ex-wife), "The whole point is not about money. It is to be perceptive enough to know what would be a delightful gift and to gratify according to one's means and inclination. It is not some sort of monetary exchange." I knew the woman would be in heaven wearing a cashmere sweater but just couldn't bring herself to buy one. (BTW, he and I are long over; she and are still friends.)
What my family has done re Christmas to take some of the agony of the UGH gift out is to demand Christmas lists. Not the "I expect" list--the anything and everything that I should enjoy, with emphasis on all price ranges in the understanding that we all have different incomes and responsibilities. It's not a "gimme" list; it's a help to the people who want to keep the gifts in the spirit of something one would be happy to see. (We have all had the repeated experience of saying thanks for something so awful and unreturnable that there ought to be a law!) Have you tried this in your own family?
No matter how much pressure to commercialize, Christmas is not about throwing money around. And don't let the "buzz" get to you. Listen up! I have friends with whom until recently--out of town at Christmas--I celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas. My upstairs neighbor was astonished that I understood--I gave her her own menorah, she had had to borrow--and I was up every night lighting the candles with her. (P.S. It had been years for her for havdollah--until me. I am Roman Catholic.) And she was the one selecting a Christmas tree with me who kept saying, like a child, no, we need a bigger one! And we got one--for the years she lived upstairs--that was just able to fit, 14', and we decorated it together and sang songs of both faiths.
This is what Christmas is about, I think. The birth of Christ as it relates to today and our everyday life must mean a wider and deeper and more sensitive soul, a soul that gets beyond the inevitable dross associated with Christmas and everything else.
Look, of course, it is bloody sickening to watch a gimme spiral! But how to refocus? My question for the past ten years is: The idea of giving is wonderfully enchanting. For any occasion. The question is, how does one avoid the rating on monetary value, which is disgusting but real? Which men do and women do, to no one's credit,
My stars and garters, I have posted! |
