If gift giving can be considered an art form, there are plenty of folks who qualify as masters.
These are the people who listen attentively for hints in the tiniest details of conversations throughout the year, and immediately begin their quest to find the perfect present. Once they’ve discovered it, they tuck it away — often for months — before painstakingly wrapping it in glittering foil paper and complementary ribbon. Then, come Christmastime, they blow away the recipient with their elegant and insightful offering.
For every gift-giving Monet or Michelangelo, however, there’s a kid whose crayon scrawls are posted on the fridge, purely out of parental obligation.
I’m afraid I am that kid.
Like that child, it’s not as if I don’t try. Luckily, I realized long ago that it’s a losing battle, because it’s clearly genetic.
I think back to a Christmas Eve when I was about 12 or 13. I called my brother (who is three years older) at his place of work in a panic because neither of us had remembered to buy stocking stuffers for our mom.
Let’s just say that in Dawson Creek in the early ’80s, there wasn’t a Walmart (or even a Kmart) that stayed open until midnight on Dec. 24 to rescue thoughtless teenagers. So it was up to my brother to pick up the slack — at the local Chevron station.
Cut to Christmas morning as my bewildered mother pulled from her stocking a pinetree-shaped air freshener, a can of lock de-icer, a key chain and, if memory serves, a small padlock. There may have been a pack of gum in there, too. This was long before every service station had a fully stocked convenience store, so he’d pretty much exhausted the options available to him.
Around that same year, I unwrapped my gift from my brother to discover possibly the ugliest Christmas treetop angel ever manufactured. It was made mostly of cardboard and its hair was a mystifying combination of fuzzy and sticky.
He explained to me many years later that his thought process at the time was pretty much this: “What can I find that will cost me the least, so that I can spend the rest of the money mom gave me on myself?”
I held onto it for years for the pure comedic value.
(For the record, I should add that he grew up to be a very generous adult.)
More recently, there was the Christmas he and I managed to buy each the other the exact same coffee maker (right down to the model number) and then paid Greyhound $50 to ship them across the province between Langley and Fernie — one in each direction.
No doubt, over the decades, I’ve received and probably even given dozens of lovely and thoughtful gifts. But few spring to mind as readily as the disasters.
These days, there isn’t much any of us needs that we can’t buy for ourselves (if the coffee maker incident taught us anything, it’s that), so we’ve gone to the “make a donation in my name” model for the main gifts. In addition to being pleasantly stress-free, it’s satisfying to know that the money is going toward something of real value.
This Christmas morning, in addition to one or two small items each, we’ll open our stockings. In them, my loved ones will find many items that were carefully selected especially for them — several, as far back as October.
Who knows, I may be a gift artist after all.
--Brenda Anderson is the editor of the Langley Times.
