DECEMBER 18, 2024 – My wife could easily find employment at Santa’s North Pole outpost. Within hours she’d likely be promoted to a supervisory role, and by the end of her first day on the job, she’d ascend to an executive vice president level. She has natural executive skills and exhibits good tastes and sensibilities when it comes to selecting, ordering, displaying and managing . . . stuff. I mean, look at her online book sales business for example. Over the years she’s figured out how to find, assess, buy, lug, store, list, sell, label, package, and ship thousands of used books. At tax time, she hands me a sheath of expense receipts and a revenue/commission report generated by Amazon, the platform on which she lists and from which she sells all those books. I’m rather amazed by how she’s converted used books mostly from thrift shops into a tidy cottage industry enterprise. Santa would be impressed.
He’d be equally dazzled by her talent for hunting down Christmas gifts for the family—then wrapping them neatly yet with alacrity. For this operation she wields North Pole magic. The proof: between her sleigh, which brings the presents home, and the foot of the Christmas tree, where they suddenly re-appear, wrapped and positioned as if by a famous choreographer, I see no sign of human effort or intervention.
When Christmas arrives, Beth commands the process by which gifts are removed from their repose and presented for opening. Our family is well acquainted with her method, and though none of us would dare upset it, none of us would wish to disrupt the grand order of things—the operative word being order. Beth or, under her supervision, our granddaughter, hands out gifts very deliberately, announcing the gifter and the giftee. In this manner, everyone is included in the pleasant surprise that is primarily for the benefit of the named recipient.
Once all the gifts have been revealed, examined and sampled, those to me from Beth that aren’t immediately consumable are returned to the foot of the tree for a day or two of display.
It’s all quite wondrous, all the more so when compared to my contribution to the pile of presents. Whereas Beth enjoys procuring of gifts, then wrapping and arranging them in proper fashion, my approach to the same effort is a function of desperation. Before online shopping was much of a possibility, I’d reserve an evening to wander the local mall. I’d go in and out of a dozen stores and rarely come out with a purchase. I was overwhelmed by the volume of stuff and felt very much like a deer surrounded by busy highways over which frenetic vehicles rushed at blurring speeds. After an hour I was done; one hand holding three small bags with things too lame to remember. My fallback position always involved chocolate.
One year I addressed by desperation by going long—really long—as in buying a pontoon boat for Beth and disclosing the gift by drawing a picture of the boat inside a Christmas card. The main problem with that approach, however, was it was difficult, not to mention expensive, to repeat. Moreover, the boat wouldn’t fit under the tree, though I devised a workaround by dropping the card-with-illustration into a large carton and wrapping the carton. Somehow, the gift of a boat couldn’t match multiple presents cleverly selected, magically wrapped and beautifully displayed under the boughs of the Christmas tree.
I realized that I’d been motivated by a misguided impulse—panic and feeling the pressure to match Beth’s effort to load me up with presents. She understood much better than I that the unencumbered spirit of giving brings its own incalculable reward; and more important, true giving involves more than panic-buying and panic-wrapping. It requires time, effort and thoughtfulness and lots more chocolate. Next year.
This year, with less than a week to go till Christmas, I’ll need to go . . . online.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
1 Comment
Ditto. Including the chocolate.