On Sunday, in celebration of the winter solstice, Paul Bame of Fort Collins presented a gift to his sweetheart, Emily.
“It’s not very romantic,” he said as she opened the portable nebulizer to help her breathe during severe asthma attacks.
“Yeah, it is,” she assured him. “Breathing is sexy.”
All week, Vicki Rottman has been lavishing friends with her holiday gift of choice — the current issue of Yes! magazine, about “sustainable happiness.”
“It speaks to me, especially this year,” says the Denver artist.
And sometime this morning, 11-year-old Emma Cooper of Montrose will unwrap a big, beautiful Christmas box to find, of all things, an ordinary turkey baster.
“It was her favorite thing to play with when she was a baby,” explains gift-giver Sharon Cooper, Emma’s grandma in Centennial. “She’s old enough to want to hear stories about when she was little. And she’s old enough, too, to keep a gift she could use for her own family some day, and maybe pass on to her granddaughter.”
Thus is the art of gifting, the most revealing of rituals that says far more about us as givers than receivers.
Every year at this time, we wrap up our wishes in neat packages and hope they’re not thrown out with the ribbons.
For Bame, it’s the hope of good health for the woman he loves.
For Rottman, it’s sharing with friends “all I’ve realized that we really need — to learn to remember what makes us happy.”
And for Cooper, it’s the simplest of memories that she hopes will last for generations.
Sure, sometimes we make mistakes.
Like Denver lawyer Mike Feeley, who already is regretting a gift that his daughter, Grace, hasn’t even opened yet.
“It’s a toy ATM machine,” he says. “She’s 5, see, and I’m not sure why I wanted her to run an ATM anyway.”
And sometimes we overreach.
Like Denver dad Tom Downey, who couldn’t face letting down his Ella after the 4-year-old insisted that somewhere in Toyland there’s a kid-sized, motorized Hannah Montana car.
“Thing is, such a car doesn’t exist,” Downey realized after hours of Web searching.
So he bought another, generic electric car, spent hours assembling it and then handed it over to his wife to embellish with Hannah Montana stickers.
And sometimes the gifts we give are really for ourselves.
Like the car wash that Denverite Shirley Barr, an admitted “neat-car freak,” offered her friend for Christmas. Or the sled that consultant Rick Ridder is giving his youngest kid, who happens to be 22.
It was in this vein that Matt Taylor, a consultant from California, tried to convince himself Tuesday that an $85 hand- carved nutcracker on sale near his hotel would be a hit for his twin 9-year-olds back home.
“My granddad had one, and I’ve wondered what happened to it,” he said. “There’s probably a million things my kids would rather get. But maybe in another time warp they’ll appreciate having had one of these.”
By far the sweetest gifter I came across this season is a young husband who, for reasons that will become evident, wishes to be identified only as Tim. I met him in the checkout line at Target, where he was buying a three-pack of women’s white, cotton high-cut underwear labeled, surprisingly, as briefs.
“Stocking stuffer for my wife,” he offered up. “She wears those little panties, and they seem so, you know, so cold.”
Tim, clearly, is a gifter of our era, a guy who understands that these are lean times and cold, dark days that require extraordinary gift-giving measures.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
