Lessons from the Gift Front

They have homed in from all points of the compass for Christmas, six of our seven children in our modern American blended family have returned to the hearth to participate in a Nativity scene of their childhood reimagined.

I used to do this too, like most everyone else I knew who had left home for college or work and then points beyond. Like a salmon swimming upstream to its natal pool, the trip back into childhood was an instinct I could not overcome, although it filled me with equal parts of anticipation and dread. Not because I did not come from a loving family, but thoughtful gift giving seemed to have been a gift given to some, but not to me. I wonder if my own children and stepchildren secretly feel the same way.

My sisters had always shopped for my mother on my father’s account, which is not an uncommon arrangement in American families, and perhaps helps explain why many women are so much more adept at gift giving. Of course, the well-known fact that women are also less insensitive than the men they wind up with is the real reason for their seemingly effortless successes during this season. Now that we find ourselves with our own wives and families, the childhood fear of inadequate gift giving rears its dreadful head once again.

I am part of a group of six male runners who meet most mornings in the dark at the post office before work to get our blood flowing and thickening synapses firing, such as they are. Our wives, in fact, used to refer to us runners, but now suggest we are more like shufflers. As signs of the holiday season emerge on light posts downtown and in the colored lights on the tall spruce in the town green, our discussions invariably turn to what gift we plan to give our wives. Although it is too late this year to make up for the present that will most fully reveal your insensitivity, the season will turn again, with birthday and anniversary dates looming ahead, not to mention the annual Valentine’s event that is this moment speeding toward us like a train on a loose track. So pay attention.

Each of us has a cautionary tale to share with his fellow shufflers, beginning with the time years ago, when one of our younger members was asked what he was giving his wife for Christmas and reported that she had said she did not want anything. The rest of us hooted and howled with laughter—in fact could barely stop—because we immediately recognized this as oldest marital trap in the world. We reminded him of the practice of clever Asian villagers who constructed tiger pits by carefully placing sharpened bamboo sticks in a hole along a jungle trail and covered it with leaves to impale the unwary creature. And now our own feral friend had failed to observe the signs of subtly arranged leaves that lay directly in his path.

Another classic tale among us involves a more experienced member of the group who had bought his wife a sculpture a few Christmases ago. We thought it brave that our HVAC contractor had ventured out of his comfort zone to offer his artistic wife a gift she might truly cherish. When we gathered a few days after Christmas for the early morning shuffle from his house, he was unusually subdued. We gently asked how his Christmas had gone and he took us out into the barn where the sculpture had been consigned. I do justice neither to the sculptor nor to my good friend to observe that the sight of a large welded piece of art that was an imaginative cross between a raven and a vulture did not exactly evoke a holiday spirit among its viewers, which had sadly included his wife. And the pain only increased when our friend had to phone the sculptor to arrange its immediate return.

I have to admit that I have recently fallen into a series of deep holes myself. I had generally been able to avoid painful memories of gift giving during long years of marriage by composing some verse at the last moment when prior planning and a failure to register carefully dropped hints had left this heedless husband vulnerable. But verses, too, have begun to pale recently, especially when they reveal the desperate speed of their composition. Free verse can have many meanings. Some unintended.

This fall I committed the original sin of marital gift giving by presenting a special birthday gift that had been well received when it had originally been presented, but that I had evidently forgotten I had given even though I was reminded it is an item my wife uses everyday. This was like committing three errors in a single play in baseball: the gift of a gift that had already been given being the first; forgetting same, the second; and the third, the evident fact that the original gift had not been the inspired idea that she had originally thought, but had obviously been dumb luck. Wince.

This awkward error had then been further compounded by the gift of a birthday trip to Manhattan with reservations to her favorite restaurant and tickets to a show—all of which failed to materialize when Sandy made her eventful landfall. I had sunk lower than a subway entrance at Battery Park, even though I had never pretended to be a professional meteorologist, nor that no professional meteorologists could reliably predict Sandy’s course. No, this was simply a failure of planning.

Thus, based on our hapless group’s century-worth of experience, I can offer a few tips for the earnest male gift giver. First, of course, never, ever fail to recognize a holiday, birthday or anniversary. Important corollary: if you remember to observe the anniversary of your first date, your first kiss, actually your first anything, you will bank extra points against the failures that lie ahead.  Second, of course, plan ahead. Haste compounds the sin of all insensitive gift giving, but is never an excuse for not proffering something (see 1, above). Third, pay attention to subtle hints that are offered, usually with increasing frequency as a holiday, anniversary or birthday approaches. Do not tune out. Finally, when you have failed to heed one through three above, a personal decorative item in the form of a piece jewelry can atone for most sins of omission and commission. Even Neanderthals knew this.

Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.