May it (the gift) be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. (Tolkien)
Every Christmas about this time, my sister fishes out a dog-eared and food-stained copy of a beloved book from our childhood called The Substitute Guest by Grace Livingston Hill, published in the 1920s. It is a simple love story, but it has a description of an iconic Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that we both know by heart. A lawyer on his way to a house party gets stranded in the country in the midst of a blizzard. He finds his way to a farmhouse, where he finds the family gathered there in the midst of a crisis. They, too, while preparing for a house party, and waiting for their guests (who never arrive, by the way, hence the “Substitute Guest”, get it?), learn that a critically ill old lady living up on the mountain must receive her medicine or die, and the family’s son is bundling up in order to hike up the mountain in the gathering dusk and blizzard to take it to her. Of course our intrepid lawyer/substitute guest goes with him, and after a harrowing trip up and down the mountain, stumbling about half-frozen in the dark in mega-sized snow drifts, they successfully make it back. And the perfect Christmas ensues.
What always amazed me as a child is that both the family and their unexpected guest were able to fish out of a hidden stash somewhere the absolutely perfect gifts to put under the family Christmas tree for each other. Which is probably why to this day I have a drawer upstairs (just like our family in the book) full of possible gifts. But alas, I have never had an unexpected guest who could make use of ’em.
All of which brings me to gifts and how we choose them. There are the “useful” variety (socks and gloves and kitchen spatulas); the “this-is-what-I-would-like-to-receive” kind (for me, this would be promissory notes for foot massages and back rubs and lovely candlelit dinners prepared by someone else, and trips to anticipate and — oops, this is not about me. Altho’ I will have to confess to giving all of these to my loved ones in the past, most of which have gone uncollected); the sort that is what we project the other person would just love to have but are in probability what you want for them (sexy lingerie, read a spouse gift here; the “perfect” item of clothing or personal care item that the recipient would never choose but you know that they really should be wearing or using); and at last, the really rare “perfect” gift, when the recipient is “seen” (I won’t go into what examples of those are — you either know or you don’t).
I have indulged myself in giving all these types of gifts in the past, maybe even occasionally happening upon the ‘truly seeing’ kind (altho’, again, I will admit to being terribly chagrined and dismayed at times when I thought I was giving the other person exactly what they wanted and it became apparent, no matter how gracious the recipient was, that it was way low on their wishlist).
(I could do a parenthetical comment here about “ugly capitalist Americans” who write blogs about such trivial and decadent largesse when most of the world is hungry and wanting and how we should be giving to charity. instead and the absolute ludicrous nature of what Christmas has become. But I won’t. At Christmas, I am a, however ugly, traditionalist).
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh . . . Don’tcha bet Mary and Joseph in the Christmas Story got a bundle for those first gifts? I hope so. I hope it got ’em safely home, and kept ’em in food and carpentry supplies for years.
And I hope whatever you find in your stockin’ or under the tree is either what you (truly) “always wanted” or that it can be recycled or turned in for a bundle, too.