The Wise Men didn't have this trouble. They didn't have to pop into town and queue up with the masses at the Babylon branch of Argos for a tin of Frankincense.
While I love Christmas, I don't think I've ever been fully on-board with the whole gift-giving thing. Now, you'd better hear me out, lest you think I need a visit from three ghosts overnight. I actually enjoy giving presents to people I love; I also enjoy receiving presents from people who love me! The connection is a very special one, a tangible way of understanding that you are plugged into a network, a family, a group of people who have made an active decision to prove what love looks like.
What I can't get my head around is how it went from finding a nice little something for somebody special - to this whole pressure of a stupidly busy town-centre filled with frantic parents and arguing children in shops that are like a row of plastic ovens along the high street.
Here's how it works in our family:
We do a 'secret santa'. One Sunday afternoon in November (last Sunday in fact), the whole family gets together, each with a list of items they'd like as Christmas gifts up to a specified value. My Mum fetches my top hat (that I bought for a choir performance) and all the lists go in. Then, one by one, all the lists come out again and away we go.
So this year I've got somebody who has populated their list with items which are impossible to find. I mean they may as well have asked for a hairbrush made out of unicorn hair or a signed photograph of Genghis Khan. I like the challenge, but really? So my gift to you is dragon's teeth and your gift to me is a massively stressful medieval quest to find them?
Why should we have to write lists anyway? That's stressful enough. My mind goes blank whenever I'm asked to think about what I'd like. "Come on, come on, hurry up!" says someone, "We haven't got all day." We should know each other well enough by now. After all, we are actually supposed to be related.
In the end I wrote two words on my list in massive letters. AMAZON VOUCHERS. I don't think my Mum is impressed: she seems to think I should be a bit more creative. When I pointed out that my choice not only gave my secret santa an easy time, but actually maximised my ability to be creative, she was placated, but only for a little while, and only in that one eyebrow raised, Mum way.
"What if we all just wrote that?" she asked (it wasn't really a question).
Well, it would be fine. We'd essentially be buying ourselves a token gift which we can all spend on ourselves at a later date.
And that's my point I suppose. Trading a handful of Amazon Vouchers would all still be well within the 'rules' of the secret santa, and that nebulous thing we all call the 'spirit of Christmas' would be preserved, just as my Grandma would have wanted. It would just all be rather soulless; and I don't want Christmas to lose its soul!
Mind you I did scrawl the words AMAZON VOUCHERS in capital letters on my Christmas list to make a point, so perhaps I'm not really in a position to protest.
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One thing I did do today was to start to look for little gifts for people who aren't expecting me to bless them with anything. There's another booby trap at the end of this idea: the guilty look they give you when they realise they've nothing to give you in return. However, I still think this idea is worth it, and perhaps closer to the idea of 'secret' santa than the actual secret santa that we do. I found myself in shops and departments I've never been in before, thinking about those people and asking myself how well I know them.
It turns out that that's quite a challenging question too. Have I spent enough time with that person to know, without a list, what would really float their boat? Maybe Christmas starts much earlier than I realised.
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