Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Feature - DR ABC — The Survival Guide to Gift-Getting

The Art of Receiving, based on the ‘pay it forward’ principle

It’s that time of year, where everyone from the retailers and spin-doctors of the economy to your local food bank or charity are banging that familiar gong: "It’s more blessed to give than to receive."

Though many of us would be hard pressed sourcing the phrase, it carries some unspoken authority. And although we may feel more harried than spiritually uplifted in the throes of Christmas shopping, even the bible is justifying the year’s biggest spending spree.

Something often neglected in all the Joy-of-Giving-"will-that-be-Visa-or-MasterCard"-hype is the Art of Receiving. And this isn't a wry attempt at maximizing exposure of my annual letter to Santa… Honest. I don’t actually like getting presents.

My good mates, Shelley and Sal helped me move house a couple of years ago.

"Three rulers?!"

They cleaned out my kitchen’s nefarious third drawer.

"You call yourself a minimalist? No. Sorry. We could have three rulers. But you..."

And out they went. A simple uncluttered life is not an easy thing to master. Even with ruthless friends. Mystery gifts, obscured in festive wrappings, alluringly sheathed in ribbon and paper, are the minimalist’s worst nightmare. Often simply the portents of more clutter. All too often the made-in-the-developing-world embodiment of a loved one’s precious and counted thought is an item I didn't conceive desire for, a clear window into someone else’s taste or evidence of someone else's perception of me.

When my magic matures, I will do the world a festive favour. I will invent an extractor that separates the thought from the gift and leaves you with a jar of distilled love, which you can imbibe at will, or sprinkle on your cereal. Dispose then of the gift guilt-free. I will then be liberated from the desire to make everyone happy and the girlie handbag that doesn't even fit my water bottle.

So once you've extracted the love from the gifts that missed the mark, what do you do with them? That’s where the DR ABC Survival Guide comes into play. A tactical approach to the most fraught moments of the season – the exchange of gifts.

D — When you take your First Aid, this is the cue to scan for DANGER. Under the Gift-Getting Management Plan, D stands for deceit. This is the approach for cowards and those schooled in the art of British good manners. (Guilty.) Whatever you unwrap, you are appreciative, gracious and deceptively thankful. You try and avoid outright lies. "Do you like it?" must be answered with, "Oh, you shouldn’t have", "how thoughtful you are", or "this will be very useful."

The deception comes into what you do with that gift, post exchange. It’s the Grinch’s take on the 3Rs: Recycle. Re-gift. Return for refund.

Let’s be blunt. Most of us don’t need any more stuff. Most of us aren’t going to be given our heart’s desire this Christmas. Most of us don’t know how to say, why don’t you just give me money instead. Most of us are unwilling to be labelled the Scrooge who is boycotting Christmas this year, asking for a present-free holiday. (Sacrilege! Even the Little Women knew that Christmas isn’t Christmas without any presents.)

Each of the Grinch’s 3Rs has inherent problems. Primarily because of the deception required when the gift-giver next visits and scans your apartment for signs of that wickedly ugly candleholder, sweater, tablecloth, bearskin rug they gave you. If you’ve done the good potlatch thing and kept the gift moving out in the world, you’re in trouble. You can fess up, or you can lie. ("It’s, ahh, at the drycleaners.")

This leads the true coward into the only logical position – bury the gift in the back of the wardrobe until the gift-giver pays you a visit, at which point you strategically display it. Then you’re back to the beginning of the whole messy cycle, cluttering up your life, and stuffing more and more things into your kitchen’s third drawer, repository for all your home’s orphaned items. It’s like a domestic version of WAG, and you’re the bleeding heart who can’t bear to cull through the unwanted and odd assortment of critters that haven’t found a home anywhere else.

The re-gifting option is also problematic. If it’s the thought that counts, and you’re giving away something you didn’t like, what is that thought worth exactly?

So, if you’re looking at living a life with more honesty and less clutter (and now we’re getting into the more problematic field of New Year’s Resolutions), you need to move to the next step.

R is for Reject.

This is one I've seen done with varying degrees of finesse, but usually with a bluntness reminiscent of an SUV committing road-kill. My brother has the horrific and enviable ability to honestly answer the question "Do you like it?" He just says no. Nobody dies. Admittedly. But sometimes I think the disappointment might break my heart. I guess I’m oversensitive.

My husband has no qualms about saying, "Thanks. I might take it back and exchange it for something I like." Maybe it’s a guy thing.

Gift giving is so full of yearning, the desire to check off a right-on-target, tearfully/joyfully received success. Whatever the motivation behind the gift – to impress someone, to get sex, to show a person how much you love them, to make your boss think you’re way more deserving of a promotion than your colleague – you are still looking for a bull’s-eye.

The problem with the bull’s-eye is it’s pretty tough to shoot. My favourite things have all been gifts – the blender (a one year down the track housewarming), wooden carved chopsticks (brought back from a friends’ trip to Thailand), and our stainless steel compost bin (a Christmas gem). I look over that list and it seems random and surprising even to me. How could anyone have planned it?

ABC is the strategy I’m least familiar with, hence it’s cover-all-the-angles name. A combination of audacity/bravery/craziness, ABC somehow combines honesty, sensitivity and creativity. It’s the heart-starter, the life-breath of the gift exchange. I can offer up only one real-life example.

A friend was given a lovely sweater that she would never wear in her life from her great aunt. She dummied with a move straight from the D chapter – a thankful and gracious acceptance.

But, she leapt back into the game and straight towards a touchdown when the next Christmas came around. She re-wrapped the sweater, which was still in mint condition, and gave it back to her great aunt, explaining she thought it was a beautiful sweater and obviously something her great aunt admired, and perhaps she would like to have it, because honestly, it just wasn’t to her taste.

Score.

The Art of Receiving is an art, hard to perfect with finesse, because:

• You don’t usually get what you want. (Although you might get what you need. Christmas ’91 I unwrapped a street directory. Useful. Thanks, Aunty Fay. I never lost my way.)

• Receiving requires both humility and a sense of worthiness. (And who can boast that sweet cocktail but the most enlightened and gracious?)

• The gift and the giver are distinct entities but somewhere in the purchase and packaging, their identities merge. Reject the gift and you run the risk of rejecting the giver.

• Making you happy gives a person pleasure, and that means relinquishing power and allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

I've been apprenticing in the art of receiving for a while now. Seems when you commit to living simply, good fairies suddenly appear everywhere wanting to give you things. The more lightly and empty-handed you travel, the more opportunity the universe has to rain down blessings on you. Try my experiment, you’ll see. Quit your job, take the summer off, hit the road with your best playmate and stick to a budget that is inconceivably low. If you’re not up for it, then take my word for it.

Campers heading home offered us leftover beers, canisters of fuel just as we were running out. Friends pulled out spare beds, cooked great feasts, uncorked favourite wines. At Halloween the local librarian was handing out chocolate. We pulled into thrift stores and found just what we’d been looking for. The postal clerk paid for my stamps when I pulled out my credit card to settle the bill. We were like magnets for all the world’s generosity and abundance.

There’s a litany of incidents. And it was hard. I wanted to take something of mine and press it into their hands and say, "here, I want you to have this." I needed to give back, but I had nothing, nothing but my presence, my tingling, overflowing, empty-handed presence.

Most of those people were strangers and I can’t pay them back. Just have to pay it forward. This is what confounds me most about Christmas. This mandated gift-giving becomes a chore, a duty. Yeah, better pick something up for the nephews I hardly know. Well, if we’re getting something for Fred, we should give something to his annoying flatmate, shouldn’t we?

What’s so special about this time of year that we concentrate all the gifting into a single day?

Imagine if, instead of getting that bottle of scotch for your heavy-drinking workmate, you take them out for lunch one day in April when they’re looking stressed. Imagine if, instead of deliberating over whether to get a handkerchief or a pair of socks to mail to your grandmother, you jump on a bus next long weekend with a tape recorder, and spend a day sitting with her, asking her to tell you everything she can remember about her youth. Imagine if, instead of buying some useless trinket or crappy Chicken Soup for the Soul book for your kids’ teachers, every student in the class took turns buying the teacher a latte. Once a week for the whole school year. It would cost every family $4, and our teachers would get to feel special every week. Imagine if, instead of that belly-hurting-gorge you typically cater to on Christmas Day, you donated a bag full of food to the food-bank and enjoyed Christmas Supper Lite. Imagine if, instead of buying something nice for your mother, you were actually nice to her, every day.

Maybe that’s a bit audacious/brave/crazy. I’m not giving out gifts this Christmas. And I’m more than happy not to receive any. But all year through, I plan to pay forward the blessings and kindnesses that we stumbled upon, in the least likely moments.

I like them best when they’re wonderfully unexpected.



Comments