The Lament of the Lame-Gift-Giver

For the past few days, I've been trying to find the articulation required to meaningfully blog about the giving and receiving of gifts. I have several potential blog post ideas on that topic, but I haven't yet found the right words to blog about them. Part of the reason for this is that I don't want to be a hypocrite. I don't want to blog about how to give good gifts, knowing that I'll fail at that, by my own standards. I also don't want to blog about a topic about which I know so little, compared to my audience. Maybe I'll just leave the subject of gift-giving alone. Except that I do want to make one point on the subject: We shouldn't stress out about it as much as some of us do.

Christmas was never really instituted by Christ or His church - we just kind of adopted it - but all the same, it was never meant to make people miserable or upset. Christmas is all about joy. But some people, including myself, have got it in their heads that they owe others gifts that are sufficiently valuable/thoughtful/creative/personal, and such people often find themselves falling short by our own standards. We stress out about how our gifts aren't as good as other people's gifts, and we feel like we've let our loved ones down.

I'm sure that our loved ones don't want us to feel that way, and that they wouldn't want us to stress out about how lame our gifts are. They'd tell us that they don't really care about the gifts, and that what's really important is that we get to spend time together and share our love for each other. That's what Christmas is really about - love. Gifts are just expressions of that love. But some of us aren't very good at expressing our love that way. I'm sure that my loved ones deserve better gifts than what I'm giving them, and maybe they're Christlike enough to say they don't really care about the gifts, but I still feel bad, thinking that I should have done better for them.

But as I've acknowledged above, this is not a problem that I should be worrying about. Christmas isn't really about the presents, so I shouldn't worry about it as if it were. Okay, so some of the presents are lame - that's not really the point! If the happiness of your Christmas hinges on whether I give you a wonderful Christmas present (first of all, brace yourself for disappointment, but secondly), you might want to adjust your priorities. And if the happiness of my Christmas hinges on whether or not I manage to give wonderful Christmas presents, I probably need to adjust mine. Christmas isn't really about the presents, so even if some of the presents are terrible, it's not the end of the world. I don't really care if I get lame presents. I just hope that the people I'm getting presents for feel the same way.