Yes, there is a Santa Claus, and in the true spirit of selfless giving, he’s here to help you find just the right gift for just the right person. All you need to do is know the secret
Christmas looms, like a big wobbly red jelly. Online shopping, for anyone with enough cash left to buy a small gift, seems like a good antidote to the already clogged shopping malls.
I think it’s a dark art, matching people with things they didn’t know they didn’t need until you gave it to them. Personally, I don’t benefit from the canned music and multiply disorientating reflective glares inside a mall. I find it disorientating and stressful, hardly the ideal conditions to locate something that conveys my love to another family member.
What to get Uncle Rob? Soap? And Aunty Roberta? Soap. Everybody needs soap! But if Uncle Bob gives me a Breitling watch, soap simply doesn’t wash. Not that he ever will, either. Soap is a safe bet, as most of us I suspect never buy it for ourselves.
I use it as an example to illustrate the not insignificant amount of weighing up between what is given, and what received. Typically, every odd Christmas I’ll get it wrong, and try and make up for it the following year. How am I to know my generous but always skint brother-in-law will buy me such a nice gift? Last year, it was socks, but of an expensive kind.
There is another way. The first of my two-part solution to the conundrum of buying people things is to gather gifts during the course of the year. These are always bargains, bought not only because I can afford them but because they’ve made me think of certain people I love.
As Yuletide approaches, I simply open this dedicated drawer in my old chest called ‘Gifts For Others’ (my mother had one, which is where I learnt this trick), then place a few likely items on my bed, attach names to them, and resolve to fill in the gaps where required. This means that I only need to buy one or two presents when I really need them, which lessens the load, both financially and emotionally.
My method means I don’t have to wander a shopping mall aimlessly pondering overpriced things that my loved ones might not even care for. I know I don’t have to buy to impress – and this year, it’s going to get even better. The second part of resolving the Christmas gift agony involves playing ‘Secret Santa’, which if you don’t know it yet, will save you money, time and stress, and also provide free buckets of laughter.
Besides Secret Santa, the rules for this Christmas have changed. All parents buy all kids a present. That means no dodging behind a partner or spouse, no ‘shared gifting.’ The kids are free to give presents to the adults and encouraged to do so – but it doesn’t matter if they don’t.
Secret Santa means that all adults just bring one gift each, that perhaps costs around fifty bucks, to make things fair. However, we could agree on a lesser investment, and get creative. The adults take turns to choose a present from the mutual pile and open it in front of the others.
If, for example, I really like the item someone else opened, on my turn I can forego choosing from the pile and simply take the thing I like from the hapless person who opened it, who now has the option of choosing a new gift or snaring someone else’s. He or she cannot simply take the item back from me, and each item can only be ‘stolen’ twice. Then it stays put.
In my experience, people tend to evaluate whether they’re going to steal from someone else and what the implications of that might be, but the game holds an implicit ‘no grudges’ clause, and most people somehow end up getting what they want. It’s also fun to act with feigned outrage when someone swoops something you like away from you.
This way, my sister will restrain her husband, my overgenerous brother-in-law. It will also spare the blushes of those being spoilt, and restore an element of sharing and carnival to a yearly ritual which should be about people, not things. Now where’s my present?
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