kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Christmas Croaking I started thinking about Christmas presents yesterday. Ugh. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love Christmas. I love giving presents. I love getting presents. Usually they aren’t expensive, usually I make large numbers of them, but I like stuff. Getting it, making it, giving it, swapping it. And then came the inlaws. The politics of present giving are touchy, I understand that. I don’t particularly like my inlaws (surprise! Not.) and therefore either giving them or getting things from them feels awkward. I don’t like getting gifts from people I don’t like, and I don’t like giving gifts to people I don’t like. Yargh. The Darling Husband is not much of a gift-giver. At all. He doesn’t particularly like giving gifts and since his family found a way to be snotty about them each and every time and openly a) checks for pricetags on things and b) asks, if they can’t find a pricetag, I can see why. (Cardinal sin of gift-giving and receiving—NEVER, EVER ask or even speculate as to what the price might be. Smile and say thank you. That’s it.) My dad has the right idea. We’re all sci-fi nuts, his “kids”—me, the Darling Husband, my sister, her boyfriend. So Dad hits the yard sales all summer long. He never pays more than twenty-five cents for a paperback, and he collects sci-fi books all year. At Christmas, he bundles up all the books into four bundles, numbers them, and we draw—and get the corresponding bundle. Da’s intention is that we read them, swap them with each other, donate them, or sell them when we’re done. But to me, it means that Da has been thinking of me all year round. I’ve never been able to bear to part with a one of them. That’s a present. Mum also has the right idea. She makes quilts. About every four years or so, our turn comes around again. In the meantime she gives socks and the little, useful things that we ask for—a metal spatula. A trivet. Gift certificates to Wal-Mart with things like “Get yourself some new bras, for the love of Pete” written on them. Books from yard sales that SHE picked up for me (for less than a quarter) on the making of jewelry. My sister tends to be a bit anxiety ridden about Christmas, and I wish she would relax and enjoy it. But after her self-proclaimed abdication from the commercialization of Christmas last year, she gave me the things I would never have gotten myself—Christmas cookies, in all the family recipes. A sweater that she knit for me. She’s getting the idea. I think it may take her a little time, but she’s getting there. I’m proud of my gift giving. I try to find neat things that I think people would like and would probably never get for themselves. Back in the day, Da was a Motorcycle Dude. He had a beat-up 1950’s Indian that he rode, anecdotally, from Jacksonville, Florida to Upstate New York once. Da loved his motorcycles. But a disastrous car crash in his 20’s, and two wee blonde daughters in his thirties, and a motor scooter that flipped him in his forties, pretty much put paid to his Motorcycle Days. My teen-age-rebellion-ten-years-too-late gift to myself was a leather motorcycle jacket. Whenever I wore it over, Da always petted it wistfully. But it wasn’t “practical” for him to have one, it was “too expensive”, even for the jacket, for something he’d “never wear”. So I hunted the thrifts for two years, with that in the back of my head. A couple of years ago, I gave him his leather motorcycle jacket. In my own way, I let him know that he didn’t have to worry that it was too expensive for me to get for him, and if it made him happy to wear it with his bedroom slippers out to get the mail, that was perfectly fine. (Note to folks passing over a certain picturesque road in New England, who might, just might, see a nice-looking, skinny Old Guy trucking out to the mailbox in fuzzy slippers, khakis, and a motorcycle jacket—wave. That’s my Da!) But that’s the history of giving that I’m used to. Those sorts of gifts I get, I understand. I mean, I’m a pretty constant gift giver. This summer, I’ve picked up things for my mom at almost every faire I’ve been at. When I see a book that someone might like, I get it for them. If you know me, you generally get showered with little presents all year round. The ones for the Darling Husband in the last week alone have included things like CD cases and a shirt or two. My mother and sister get the fallout from my closet all the time. But back to the inlaws. And getting gifts from folks I don't like. In case you hadn't guessed, dear NSR, I'm a little allergic to obligation. I don't like getting gifts from folks I don't like...it feels like a chore to them and ME. Considering that the inlaws insist on telling me how much they paid for things, it makes it worse. Nope, I'm not for sale, and if I were, not to you. And what can you give these people? I know what I want to give them.... But that could get me arrested. So I'll settle for what I did last year. Little gift baskets, full of toys and odds and ends. Soap, candles, incense, other stuff. I wish I could give them a sense of humor. A sense of valuing their son and brother and cousin. I wish I could give them love in their hearts to pass along. I would like to give them a modicum of intelligence, and interests in a million hobbies. But I'll settle, I guess, for gift baskets. And this year...this year... A punch in the MOUTH if they behave like they have every other Christmas. Goddamit. 6:03 p.m. - 2002-09-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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