On Gifts

Christmas is often one of the flashpoints of liberal parenting. We don't want our kids to think in mercenary terms about gifts and family, but we want them to be properly impressed and distracted so we can sneak upstairs and have "quality time." It's a tough balance to strike.

I don't generally set dollar amounts, but I do try to get each kid one main present and whatever accoutrement it needs to be entertaining, at least for a while. So the boy has a Nintendo DS, which came from eBay with a game and two movies, and we purchased the one other game we knew he really, really wanted. Some family board games and DVD's, and a "Family Time Capsule" I found at Sal's Boutique (but unused and still in the box) complete his gift. Thers bought some sports stuff and art supplies as stocking stuffers, as he always does, but really, that's it.

The teen is mostly DVDs and videogames, but her big present is an incubator, a hangover from last year's unfortunate duck adventure. She wants ducks, and I want chickens, so by next summer we should be poultry farmers.

Rosie's gift is a baby doll with clothes, a bed, bottles, and a tea set (unrelated). She talks about baby dolls nonstop, so we know this will be a winner. SP, who's really too young to be acquisitive, is getting some balls and Fisher Price people and little cars. But I feel guilty, a bit, because these are all small things. It's like I'm punishing him for being good-tempered and sweet.

Thers conveniently told me exactly what he wants: mostly DVDs, so it's easy, and they're really family presents. But I know I bum him out, because he often has no idea what to get me. (See Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann have the same fight here.)

Amd I so hard to buy for? I dunno. I don't think I can be, really, because he usually ends up with something spectacular at the last moment: an ipod one year, a really beautiful desk organizer another, a coffee table I was coveting another still. So he does know me, but he never really gets around to shopping until, well, today, and that bothers me. My guess is that he will leave me at my family Christmas and wander out to find something wonderful, but I'll be cranky because he left me with my crazy family.

My brothers and I had a family meeting yesterday at which we agreed that this was going to be the last present-exchanging Christmas. I was suprised at how sad it left me, not because I want the stuff, but because the gift exchange is the one time of year when we look at each other, talk to our sibling's spouses, and say "who ARE you?" which, after all, is what the whole "what do you want for Christmas?" question is really about. Now, with my family party transitioning to a purely social event, we won't ever ask that question. And that bums me out.

So this is a dilemma, no? At what level is the whole secular Christmas gift thing symbolic of something else? But if I see the exchange as one of the last links holding my family together, how am I supposed to communicate to my kids that the "stuff" doesn't matter?