Buying Stuff

Here we are, at sort of the end of the beginning of the spending orgy that starts the annual accumulation of debt in honor of the birth of Jesus. While the season should involve debt, it’s not the kind that can be redeemed by money and not the kind owed to the credit card company.

Sorry. I get cranky about that.

There ought to be thinking behind anything we do. The trendy word is “mindful,” though it is now more employed by what’s left of the New Age crowd or the out and out insane. But if we can scrape those barnacles off of it, there’s a seed of wisdom to be found, in the idea that we ought to put some thought into the Christmas presents we give.

I once knew a man, the patriarch of a patrician New England family, who was generous at Christmas and other times — but on his own terms. He was unimpressed with what people wanted for their Christmas presents. If you asked, or even if you didn’t ask but he liked you or was stuck with you for some reason, he would explain why. As the years passed (he is long gone now), his reasoning has more and more appealed to me.

His idea is that a gift, anytime but especially at Christmas, oughtn’t be what someone said they wanted but instead what you wanted them to have. It shouldn’t be merely buying for someone what they desired at the moment. It should be something into which you put thought and that would thereafter be a connection between you and the recipient, reflecting your best estimation of that person. There should be some of you in it.

(Important language lesson: the word “gift” is not a verb. You give a present. This fact was entirely understood until a few years ago, when some marketer decided to open fire on the English language instead of doing actual work, and trendy urban bumpkins slurped it right up.)

Now, childhood having receded into foggy, distant memory, I consider the things that I got for Christmas as a kid. I discover that the things I asked for are long gone, but the things given to me in the probably forlorn hope I’d amount to something remain.

An aunt each year gave me a subscription to “Natural History,” the magazine published by the American Museum of Natural History. I was never jump-up-and-down excited when the month’s issue arrived, but somehow I would read it all, even the stuff that wasn’t interesting at first. (I was put off by how there weren’t more articles about reptiles, my childhood passion.) And those articles became part of my mental permanent collection, woven into the store of personal knowledge we were expected to accumulate before we surrendered knowledge to the whims of Wikipedia. A cousin (I think) gave me a subscription to “Boys Life,” the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. I was a Boy Scout, and while my experiences in the organization weren’t as colorful as those depicted in its pages, I greatly enjoyed the magazine. I still remember and tell some of the jokes from the page devoted to them each month.

To wit:

A doctor fell into a well

And broke his collarbone

A doctor should attend the sick

And leave the well alone.

I imagined whittling — yes, there was a time when young men were encouraged to be skilled in the use of knives — the the various slides for the kerchief of the scout uniform. I never actually made one, though I came close. One month the slide-of-the-month was not whittled but harvested. It was a scaly ring from the tail of an armadillo. Thereafter there was dissension in my family during our trips south whenever there was a dead armadillo in the road. I wanted us to stop so I could collect the materials to make a kerchief slide. I was rapidly and vigorously outvoted, and my parents were right. I did not recognize it at the time, but the rotting carcass of a prehistoric throwback in a hot car would not have enhanced our vacation. (Though it might have qualified me to later become the secretary of Health and Human Services.) Also, the aroma would certainly have been permanent, so even if the project had been carried to completion my fellow scouts would have stayed upwind of me.

The plastic (and at the time often metal) toys that were under the Christmas tree are mostly forgotten. Things I capriciously desired were by the same fickle emotion forgotten and in due course discarded.

The things I received that I didn’t request are the things I still have. My bookshelves can attest to that, as can my kitchen, the top drawer in my chest of drawers, and other places around the house. And each time I see, read, or use one of those things given to me, I think of the person who gave it to me and wonder how he or she could have known. And though I no longer have it, the Yashica A I got for Christmas when I was 8 shaped my life from that day on.

Some years ago I was asked to tag along as a friend went Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve for presents to give his two young daughters. It took only half an hour to roar through the toy store in the new shopping center — it was called a “mall,” though I don’t know why; I do know that during the Christmas season “maul” would be a more appropriate spelling. There was not a second’s thought put into any of the presents beyond there being two of them no matter what the item was. That experience made an impression on me because it so perfectly illustrated what Christmas has become.

Since then, buying Christmas presents has become so much easier and so much worse.

I have little relatives all over the place, none local to me. Wanting to be a good uncle, I try to get them gifts at Christmas (the ones whose whereabouts are known to me, anyway; we are a peripatetic and not overly chatty family). So I begin by making inquiries as to what the kids are up to, their talents and interests and so on. Then I try to select and send them things they would be happy to have or should have based on my interpretation of their lives. Is it a successful endeavor? I have no idea. It seems the thank-you note is also a thing of a bygone day. (I cannot criticize here; when I was a child I was awful at such things and when a thank-you note was inescapable I struggled to write what I thought the recipient would want to read, rather than a couple lines of heart-felt thanks.)

Compounding the felony is the fact that usually I have never even seen the gifts I am giving. They are almost always ordered online and shipped directly to the recipient. I do not know if they are of great quality — online reviews, being increasingly fraudulent, are of little help — or cheap plastic trash. So the whole exercise is to some extent less finding something that will make a child smile not just now but long into the future than it is checking a box. Christmas gift giving has moved, from finding something especially selected for someone you care about, to a task that must be performed.

There are exceptions. A few years ago I knew a local man who made very clever mechanical wooden toys. They were wonderful and sturdy, the kind of thing that in a few generations could become family heirlooms. So for a time I would send these to my little great-niece and -nephews. I had to keep track of which ones I had sent to each child, so I could send different ones next year. Then, one year, I went to make the annual purchases and discovered his little woodland shop was closed. (I worried about him but later ran into him in the diner and learned he’d just gotten tired of making them.)

I look at the wall to my left and see things I treasure. They are framed pencil drawings made for me by a very dear friend, Christmas presents over the years. They are what I would rescue in an emergency.

I remember the beautiful cherry wood sewing stand my father made for the older of my sisters one year, and how I would go with my father in the after-supper cold to my grandparents’ basement to work on it with him, even though he should have been sleeping because he was a newspaper reporter who needed to be at work at 5:30 a.m. And I smile. I think she still has that sewing box.

I remember, too, my mother sitting on the couch night after night, crocheting the woolen squares that would ultimately be sewn together into afghans, presents for family friends (even if they were never done by Christmas and got delivered in March).

Little induces a smile more consistently than my sister’s calendars. She makes elaborate ones, great big and pretty, with pictures of family members on their birthdays and other notable events. (I think we’re supposed to be surprised each month, like an extended Advent calendar, but I cheat and look at all the pages as soon as it arrives each year. Don’t tell her.) She has made them for years. I have kept them all. They are never done by Christmas, either, but who cares?

So when I hear the talk of “black Friday” or “cyber Monday,” or the damnable “gifting,” I turn my mind to the pre-Amazon days, when Christmas presents meant something.