Gifts

Yesterday was my birthday. Today I am serving my time in purgatory. Tequila is obviously a demon, perhaps a vampire, which as everybody knows from Buffy, is a type of demon., so ergo, tequila is a demon. It's particular power is seductive, luring you with its fermented agave nectar then bringing you to ecstasy with its intoxicating power, only revealing its true character as an unholy succubus the next day, when it whops you with its make-insides-wobbly spell and devastates you with its suck-out-motivation-and-energy-to-be-productive-or-clean-up-after-your-party spell.

This is the season of gift-giving and gift-receiving. Gift giving is, like marriage, something that is widely accepted as important but that is poorly understood (and only practiced by homosexuals in Massachusetts and Canada).

Let's start out with what gifts should NOT be. The lowest form of gift, the laziest and least rational, would be an exchange of equal amounts of money. If my friend and I gave each other 20 bucks, that would be really stupid, wouldn't it? Nothing is lost or gained by either party. Now, let's look at something that might be the highest form of gift giving. In my mind, that would be something like a completely unexpected, undeserved, unique, unrequited, personalized item...one that a person really loves (and perhaps needs) but would never have bought for him or her self. A really thoughtful gift requires a good amount of knowledge about your gift receiver, and it requires the giver to put in effort.

To the extent that a gift exchange approximates the first example, it is inferior, and to the extent that it approximates the latter, it is superior.

This is not to say that practical gifts (i.e., gifts whose usefulness is transitive, as opposed to gifts whose usefulness is intrinsic) are always bad ones. A gift of money to a poor person (or a poor son...thanks mom!) can be very good gifts. To be good, though, they should be unrequited...an exchange of gift certificates is little better than an exchange of cash, but a non-requited gift certificate may make somebody's life a lot easier). Second, the practical gift should not be something that somebody would obviously buy for themselves anyway (like laundry detergent, trash cans, toothpaste, canned tuna, etc). It need not be completely frivolous or indulgent, but it should have at least a touch of fun (a gift certificate to Best Buy or a nice restaurant is ok...a gift certificate to the grocery store is not).

Buying good gifts, though, is risky. I like to buy people artistic things, particularly locally made art. But judging taste, even of people I know well, is really hard. If you get it right, then you have given somebody an awesome, memorable gift that will make them feel really googley and tingley and sparkley inside. If you're wrong, you've just given them a useless piece of crap that they have to pretend to like.

I think this element of risk is important, though. It's why I disapprove of returning gifts. Returning practical gifts is ok, because the giver was lazy in giving it to you anyway, but returning a "thoughtful" gift just sucks all the excitement out of the process.