Presents

This time of year always makes me glad that about 20 years ago I arrived home from Christmas shopping and talked to my family about my new found feelings on present giving. Admittedly back then I was a bit of a mini-revolutionary. I was a vegetarian campaigner who marched for my cause and didn’t buy fruit from South Africa. Still, I can vividly remember walking through the shopping centre in Cheltenham, near to closing time, still struggling to find just the right gift for my sister. The reality was that she really didn’t need anything. Certainly nothing I could afford. And while I wandered, the music playing in my ears was “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”.

I arrived home empty-handed and sat down with my family. I told them that I’d had a revelation, that we should stop the madness and just not buy each other presents any more. That we should extend this to wider family members. My mother admitted that she and her brother had told each other to go out and spend some pre-arranged amount of money on each other and she was feeling badly that she hadn’t got around to deciding what to buy herself from him yet. She rang him immediately and told him of our plans and he wholeheartedly agreed. In fact, everyone did. There was a real sense of relief. Relief that we didn’t have to head back out into town for yet another Saturday and could instead focus our time more productively. Relief that we didn’t have to spend money for the sake of it. And relief that we wouldn’t be cluttering our lives up with yet more stuff we didn’t need.

Now many of my friends all tell me that Christmas gift giving is about the thought rather than the actual gift. That the person you are buying for will be glad you thought about them (and spent all your Saturdays leading up to the big day immersed in the horror that is the Christmas High Street). That we just didn’t put enough thought into what each other might like. As Christmas approaches though and they are all madly running around still shopping they each secretly admit that they too wish they could stop.

Of course this arrangement has been adapted somewhat since we’ve had children. I remember the excitement of presents when I was a child and wouldn’t dream of denying it to them. We adults still go without but they wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking and a (modest!) pile of presents under the tree. I guess that for children the experience of opening presents really means that the thought does count. For the grown-ups, or at least for us, the negative experience of all the mindless shopping outweighs the pleasure of the presents. Oh, and the other thing people think is that come the day we all sit around regretting our lack of presents. I promise, we don’t. And neither would you.