the one

I never fully realized the power of social customs. I always knew they were prevalent, and generally unquestioned, but it’s amazing how deeply rooted they are.

I’ve never been one to take our societal customs — or anything — at face value. Social etiquette? A guide at best. Rules asking to be broken, if you ask me. One example I can give, and also one I have been fighting against, is what I’ve come to term Expectation Gifting (yes, with capital letters).

If someone has a Birthday, you get them a gift. If it’s your anniversary, you get your mate a gift. If it’s Christmas, you go completely bloody nuts making sure you have something for absolutely everyone who has so much as sneezed in your direction. Getting these gifts has become expected. And you’re probably not getting them the decongestant they so dearly need.

If you simply tell someone not to get you a birthday gift, they’ll still get you three gifts, take you for drinks and hire you a prostitute. Cause hey, it’s your birthday!

Why is this a bad thing, you ask? After all, you like booze and hookers.

Well, let’s break it down further. There are generally two kinds of gifts. The first is one the giver herself comes up with the idea for. (I’m going to use the female pronoun, but feel free to substitute the male one in if it bothers you, you misogynistic prick.) The second is the kind that comes from a list that the receiver drafted. I’ll address the List Gift first.

To me, the Lift Gift, and the list from which it comes, is by far the worst bastardization of the gifting concept. It is a plague on us all and is a perfect example of what’s wrong with, well, everything. I’m not a conspiracy nut, but the rest of this paragraph is something for those of you who are to chew on: The retail industry basically survives in its current state (which I would call bloated) thanks to the holiday spending season. They ruthlessly market to kids to get them desiring toys that have no practical value and make them no happier than a cardboard box would. So say the Christmas list concept was invented, or at least pushed and marketed, by the retail industry as part of the holidays to get little children thinking and listing material desires from the first year they can speak. Now, by design, a Christmas list contains more items than the child will get on the occasion, thus instilling a perpetually unfulfilled desire. Eighteen years of this, and we have a new adults obsessed with materiality, ready to pass it on to their own kids.

God knows how Gift Lists became the norm. The gifts given to Jesus upon his birth were not Expectation Gifts and they certainly weren’t on any list Mary wrote up and sent to all the wise men she knew. They were good faith gifts, chosen by the wisemen (or possibly the wise mens’ assistants) to give to the new baby.

This brings me to the second category of gifts, those chosen by the giver.

Giver-Chosen Gifts better reflect what I believe to be the true concept of a gift. Of course, this category is also plagued with gifting disease: the Status-Quo Gift. This is a gift that is generally what the receiver’s peer group would like, but has no specific link to the receiver or giver. It loses even more marks if it is easily attainable. I’ll illustrate with one of the most common gift ideas, a bottle of wine. If you know a wine drinker, go to the local liquor store, pick out a bottle almost at random, and give it to them, that’s a Status-Quo Gift. It doesn’t show caring or effort, nor does it show a particular knowledge of the receiver. It was likely nothing more than a chore for you, just something you had to do because a gift was expected. The receiver is slightly grateful, but neither party got much out of the transaction besides the mental contentment knowing they’ve lived up to societal expectations.

So what are the better gifting ideologies? Staying with the bottle of wine example, say you go on a trip to a winery in another country and love a particular wine so much you bring back as many as you can legally import. When you get home, you visit a friend and bring a bottle for her, hoping she’ll love it as much as you do. This is what I call the Transitive-Love Gift. I love it, I love you, therefore I think you will love it. It doesn’t always work that way, but it’s an exercise in exploring commonalities among loved-ones, which is never a bad thing.

Unfortunately, the situation leading to the gift quality is not always clear-cut. In this same foreign-wine scenario, the giver or receiver could view the bottle of wine as a souvenir. This introduces Expectation again, and dumps the gift right back down to the bottom of the gifting ideology bucket.

That brings us to the true nature of gifting. The giver-chosen, no-occasion, because-I-knew-you’d-like-it gift. This, to me, is the only gift worth giving. Generally, two things are true before you give this kind of gift. First, you know the person well enough to know they’d like it. Second, you care enough about the person to go to the trouble. (You’re not doing this for your tax accountant.) I’ve only ever given a handful of these gifts in my life, but each time it was filled with a potent mix of excitement, anxiety and pride. It’s the thrill of giving. You just don’t get that feeling thinking, “I hope she likes the watch I got her for her birthday.”

That basically covers the gifting, but there’s one other angle that’s important to look at this from, as it reveals a flaw in the Expectation Gifting process — the moment of reception.

A lot of Expectation Gifts are completely off the mark. Usually, these are ones not on any list, but aren’t Status-Quo Gifts either. The giver choses something she bets you will like, when in fact it’s about as relevant to you as last month’s Modern Lizard magazine. (Or perhaps the gift was Modern Lizard magazine because one-time as a child you drew a gecko and it was the only thing your aunt ever saw you do.) Then, and we’ve all been in this position, you have to fain enthusiasm while a crowd of people silently watch your expression, half of whom know you well enough to know you hate lizards. Awkward. (This is only an issue because social diplomacy is so highly valued, but that’s a topic for another day.)

With all that said, I’ve set about to change things in my own life. I no longer accept Christmas or birthday gifts, or get them for anyone who I would reasonably be expected to do so. This took a lot of prior discussion with everyone to get them all on board, but was largely successful. I started with my birthday the first year, then moved on to Christmas the next, convincing everyone not to exchange gifts with me. The first time you suggest it, you’re either called crazy or outright dismissed. If you’re at all flippant about it, no one will take you seriously. And it’s all or none. If one person breaks the rule, words gets around, and the flood gates fly open.

In convincing would-be givers to not get me anything, I came up with an alternative that relieves some of the guilt the giver will feel. I call it Gift Inversion Therapy. Tell the giver to get herself a gift that you, the receiver, will indirectly benefit from. For example, I drink coffee at my friend’s house a lot. So for my last birthday, she got herself a new coffee grinder. She could then alleviate the social guilt from not getting me anything by making me a cup of coffee with her new grinder. Other examples could be video games or books the would-be receiver could later borrow. It’s a great system, and avoids the deadweight loss (look it up) associated with gifting, because the would-be giver won’t spend beyond the real utility of the gift.

To conclude, I must say the goal here is to not to get you to give up gifting like I have — this was only one example of a larger problem. The moral here is that you should question those things you do just because you think you ’should’ do them. Start to question everything. Keep an open mind, and you’ll begin to see how much of a chump you really are. Awareness is the first step towards recovery. And that’s my gift to you. Happy Random Tuesday.