Most of us have at least one person in our lives who gives good gifts. Sometimes we treat this ability as if it were a special talent, but it isn’t. It’s like cooking — you can get pretty good at it if you try. We treat it as a special talent so we don’t have to cultivate it, for that means giving away our time and money to other people. Two of the hardest things to do.
I’ve had three good gift-givers float through my life, but here’s the problem — they’ve died, and as I scan the perimeter of my extended friends and family, I don’t see anyone taking the helm. Shoot, I don’t even see any promising up-and-comers.
It seems that as gift giving has become easier — and with all the specialized stuff you can buy and ship online, it certainly has — quality has diminished. It’s just too easy to give a mediocre gift. I should know, because that’s what I give — mediocrity in the form of gift certificates. If a gift certificate could talk, here’s what it’d say: “Hi, I felt the urge to get you a gift, but the urge wasn’t strong enough for me to think about it more than 23 seconds, so while I was picking up coffee and baby formula from the grocery store I bought this for you. Enjoy. You so deserve it.”
A gift the recipient can’t remember six weeks later is not a good gift.
I recently went to a wedding where the bride and groom asked for cash. I appreciated the honesty (if you love me, shower me with cash, baby), but that request rankled me as I thought about it.
I like to have at least some choice when I give.
So do women who have had kids and thus fancy themselves expert mothers. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, she was less than enthused about having a baby shower, feeling awkward about asking people to buy stuff she could afford to buy. Her friends persuaded her to have a shower with the reasoning that “people are excited for you and want to buy you things.” So she and I spent a good deal of time walking through Target with those scanner things and setting up our registry online, confident that we provided price ranges for the regular folk and heavy hitters alike.
Did most of the women who attended — including those who persuaded my wife to have a shower — buy items that were on the registry? Of course not, — they gave what they wanted to give, not what we had asked for. At least most of the women put some thought into it. Again, it’s more than I usually do.
Teachers are well known for not following the advice they dish out, and when I was in the classroom I told my students that writing a paper was sort of like giving a gift to someone: If you plan and work on it far before it’s due, you’ll sort of enjoy the process and produce good work. Wait till the last minute, however, and it will seem like an arbitrary obligation that you just want to be done with.
My best advice stems from the issues I struggle with. What’s going to help me this season is that my extended family is experimenting with a gift exchange in which I’m assigned to just one person. I am capable of buying one thoughtful gift. That’s my December mantra.
So I channel the deceased gift-givers in my life for guidance. A good gift starts with a high-quality object that the recipient will use regularly. (True, a good gift doesn’t have to be an object, but that’s beyond me this year.) People already have too many objects vying for their attention, and if it’s not something that can be put into one of their routines, forget about it. The high-quality criterion is critical, for good gifts last. They are tinged with immortality, though the givers are whisked away. In stolen moments throughout the years, we behold the gift and the giver grows in our memory.
That’s the star I’m shooting for this season.
Daniel Brigham (daniel@danielbrigham.com) lives in Louisville and creates online training for organizations.
