Seventeen

Christmas Shopping

I’ve done a bit here and there, but I am not well along the way to being finished. Something, there, about, you know, MOVING.

Obviously, I have the list of folks who’ll be very happy with gift cards. I can wait a couple of weeks until the Thanksgiving fun is finished. (So after the turkey is done. Yes, I have my pretentious moments, but that’s one of those things that irks me for some strange reason)

Going through this and some of my gift ideas, however, brought up a couple of things with gift-shopping

  1. Many gifts I remember giving were the ones that ended up giving me the most pleasure (for seeing the reaction), and;
  2. So much seems to be a matter of reliving past moments of adequacy.

For the first one, I was going to throw out a few of my past ones. I only remember a couple. Still, I’m trying to remember the ones I’ve given that get a fair amount of use by the recipients. There’s not a lot of things I see lately that I gave which are being used. I hope my grandfather is enjoying the gift I gave him for his birthday. Maybe he’s using that. The mittens I bought my wife, on the other hand, aren’t getting used. (They’re fur-lined. Even if the bunny was going to die, anyway, she doesn’t want her hands feeling his/her fur….) I would assume my mother still uses the very expensive KitchenAid waffle iron I bought my parents while my dad was still alive.

I’m also reminded of something from my Randian past, the gift of a necklace (pendant?) in Atlas Shrugged. The precipitant, the novel’s main character, really likes and values the piece of jeweler. But when the giver gave it to her, he had her model it wearing only the necklace.

So I find myself wondering whether, when I buy a gift, it’s for the recipient, or for me. I just nixed something I was considering, simply because, ultimately, it was something that was probably more for me than for the person to whom I was planning to give it.

On the second, I really don’t want to re-do something I’ve done previously. Again, though, it comes down to the reaction the gift evoked. I might have done something creative, but, ultimately, I did it because of the reaction it’d evoke.

So I find myself trying to recreate that with something similar, but a little different.

Is it even a gift, then?

Too many thoughts for this early on a Sunday.