gwax's rumblings

For those of you that don’t recall the past, I’m usu­ally not a big fan of Christmas. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is usu­ally a hol­i­day that I do not like. It’s really all mis­ery that I bring upon myself by being overly puris­tic with regards to prin­ci­ples of gift­ing. As far as I’m con­cerned, a gift is meant to express your under­stand­ing of the recip­i­ent and, as such, the gif­tee shouldn’t tell the gifter what is desired. The end result, for me, is usu­ally that I am dis­ap­pointed to dis­cover that I have received noth­ing that I wanted and am left with the feel­ing that nobody under­stands me. Of course, it prob­a­bly doesn’t help that I rarely have some­thing that I actu­ally want so peo­ple are left hav­ing to get me some­thing that I want with­out my giv­ing them any hints and with­out my really hav­ing any idea what sort of thing I might want to begin with. Yeah, great sys­tem I’ve got, make peo­ple find a gift that I want but don’t know it. In case it wasn’t obvi­ous, I am gen­er­ally not a fan of my birth­day either.

This year, how­ever, I decided to take a dif­fer­ent approach to Christmas. Instead of hop­ing that peo­ple would get me appro­pri­ate gifts and hav­ing my hopes dashed, as on a rock, I approached this hol­i­day with­out hopes. The direct effect of this year’s approach is that I’m not bit­ter for lack of proper gifts, but there’s the side-effect that I really don’t know whether I’m pleased by this year’s omnium-gatherum or not. For those of you out there that feel like point­ing, call­ing Scrooge and say­ing that I’ve lost the Christmas spirit, I really don’t care. I’m pretty sure that I lost the Christmas spirit many years ago and, if approach­ing the hol­i­day dis­pas­sion­ately means that I’m not sad and bit­ter, I’m fine with giv­ing up the hope of get­ting a good gift.

In clos­ing, bah humbug.

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(I did derive some enjoy­ment from gift giv­ing this year. Gift giv­ing and exces­sive wrap­ping, that is.) show
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This entry was posted on Monday, December 25th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under waksman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.