By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
I am submitting this column June 19. That’s 36 days before our next family birthday, 155 prior to an upcoming anniversary and 189 remaining days until Christmas. I haven’t bought gifts for any of them, but I’ve given them all significant thought on nights I can’t sleep and the idea seems to be to keep it that way.
I care a lot about the gifts I give people. On the other hand, I’m quite cheap, though I’ve gotten less so the past couple of years. The gifts are winning out. I’m spending more on them, and I’m giving more of them, whether or not it costs me two complete REM cycles some nights.
I find it difficult to decide on the right gift. And while I don’t think I’m an especially commercial person, I do like to celebrate with small gestures, surprises or dinner parties, though try bringing a small gesture to a 5-year-old’s birthday party and see how far it gets you. There are times only stomp rockets and a very large bow will do.
I exchange easily the highest number of gifts each year with my husband. He’s a techie, and where he learns about the newest tech products escapes me completely. Reddit? Various obscure blogs? A coworker I should seek out and kill? The sky? Between us, we celebrate birthdays, Valentine’s Day, our wedding anniversary, Mother’s and Father’s Days, the anniversary of the day we met and Christmas. That’s six occasions a year that I’m trying to talk to him in his sleep about GoPro accessories. He doesn’t like telling me outright what he wants because that would be wonderful or, as he puts it, cheating.
My husband insists I don’t need the help and that he is easy to shop for. In a way, that is true: There are many things that he wants, but when he wants them, he goes out and gets them. This year a new camera came out three days before Father’s Day. I bought it at the Costco in Manassas.
Nothing prepared me for gift exchanges with my husband, who dislikes practical gifts and delights in the extravagance of receiving something he doesn’t need. My father is the complete opposite and wants only something he will use so often that it will wear out in a year’s time, at which point you buy it for him again—same make, model and color. Or you could not do that and tape the gift receipt to the outside of the box.
Far and away, though, I spend the most time deciding what to buy children, the shape-shifters of gift recipients. It would be, like, so stupid to think a thing a child liked last year would make a good gift for him now. My nephews loved Thomas the Tank Engine for one season of gifts, but to give them a train product today would be an insult on the level of spitting in their juice boxes. I don’t get to see my nephews as much as I’d like to, so I try to always have gifts for both of them when I do. Gifts are a big deal for kids. Don’t screw it up. Never give clothes, and be fair. I couldn’t summon a single fact about my uncle’s travel or purchasing habits from the year I was born to the advent of Facebook—other than that when I was 9 years old he went to Jamaica, where he bought his other niece, and not me, a souvenir doll.
My extended family organizes a Secret Santa at Christmas, though everyone cheats and still sneaks the kids their own gifts. For Secret Santa, there are people you want to get and people you really do not want to get, like cousin John, who underwent a minimalist lifestyle makeover and doesn’t drink or eat for pleasure. Secret Santa is beautiful, though, for its elimination of guesswork—you’re never left wondering whom you’re buying for that year. The rest of the time isn’t so cut and dry. My brother’s birthday, for instance, falls a month before mine. Do I get him a gift? Did he get me something last year? Was that before or after he moved to Colorado? Does our gift-giving degree justify quasi-cross-continental postage rates? Does he remember getting me something last year?
The only person whose gifts I spend no time deliberating is my son. There we have the reverse problem, which is that I know exactly what he wants, from every place I go, and constantly have to tamp down the urge to buy it all for him. He’s young enough that we haven’t decided yet if we’re going to do Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with him, though we definitely are. My husband says he wants credit for the things we buy him, until something backfires and we assign blame accordingly.
And there’s so much room for backfire. In middle school, a girl named Kelly gave everyone in the entire grade gifts at Christmas. Every person. Every year. Always really nice stuff, too, like Bath & Body Works mini lotions, which were crack cocaine to middle-school girls in the late ’90s. Kelly was so sweet that we all took her for granted and never got anything for her. How could we? It was probably a combination of things, like forgetfulness and being horrible.
Gifts are a measure of your attention to detail. The best one I ever got was a pair of tickets to a Barenaked Ladies concert. This was in 1999, when the Barenaked Ladies played at American football stadiums and not on PBS for Canadian figure-skating events. The tickets were a gift from my dad, who has listened to the same three Beatles albums the last 40 years, occasionally finding time for Jimmy Buffett’s “Christmas Island.” To his taste, BNL was never going to edge out “Mele Kalikimaka,” but he knew I loved them, and that show was one of the great nights of my life.
The worst gift I ever got was an egg timer, in taupe—a fat, wet loogie, right in the juice box.
My mother, who taught second grade for 30 years, insists on her own reign as empress of the bad gift. Every year on her last workday before Christmas, she would gather the students to her desk for their presentations of unflavored ChapStick tubes and expired gift cards. This mystified my aunt, who taught seventh grade and never got anything, so my mom liked to rewrap the best five for her and share. She made sure of what I bought my own teachers, too, which every year was the same hardy plant.
Our next family birthday is when my nephew turns 7. Amazon’s gift generator is suggesting monster trucks and a remote-controlled helicopter. But I think I’m getting him a Roman gladiator helmet, something I came up with on my own. It’s a risk—one that flirts, dangerously, with looking an awful lot like clothes. If he hates it, so will his brother, who’s getting the same thing because he needs it after not seeing me for a year. So I got the ones with the best plumage and least cheap-looking spray paint. I spent $20 each on those helmets.
It’ll be worth the looks on their faces and the next 119 days of undisturbed sleep.
@CitySprawlNVMag gifts free tweets via Twitter.
(August 2015)