on gifts, manners, and memory

The things we remember, and why.

I don’t know what to do with myself when I receive a gift.

I’m like a bad actor, standing on stage, unsure of where to put my hands. It’s an old and engrained thing; although I love giving gifts, getting them makes me incredibly self-conscious, and while I’ve tried to unpack why over the years, I could never quite put my finger on it. Recently, I landed here:

As a young child, most of the gifts I received traveled along a certain continuum: the pair of formal white gloves that I would never wear, but that were given to me by an aunt convinced they’d make a little lady out of me. A box of incorrectly monogrammed hankies meant for someone else — linen, stitched in narrow lines of pale pink and yellow — sent to me by a distant relative I’d never met. A massive faux turquoise cocktail ring set in gold-toned plastic and surrounded by glass chips/diamonds, far too large for any of my four-year-old fingers, and a re-gift from a much older, icy family member who had very definitely rummaged around her circa 1967 jewelry box looking for something she didn’t so much like, that she could wrap up and thrust down at me in a display of feigned beneficence while everyone looked on. (HERE, she said. This is for YOU!)

Sort of like this, but plastic. Please do not give this to a 4-year-old.

Re-reading this last paragraph makes me sound and feel like a terrible and ungrateful lout, but the fact is, we are trained from our earliest days to beam widely and exclaim Oh my gosh THANK YOU this is so FABULOUS when, in the recesses of our four-year-old brains where gift trauma has taken up permanent residence, we’re wondering on exactly what occasion we might wear the cocktail ring given to us by (and meant for) someone else’s grandmother, or the white gloves meant for the first communion that we will never have because we’re not (even remotely) Catholic. It’s on these occasions when we first experience bouts of gift-related sheepishness borne of a mashup of capitalist covetousness and desire coupled with hope and disappointment. Young people know when something is not appropriate, and because we are told by our parents, clergy, and teachers that lying is bad, things are bound to get confusing; we instinctively bite our tongues when, at four years old, we are expected to do just that when someone hands us a re-gifted fake cocktail ring suitable for no one under the age of seventy. What we want to say is Why on earth would you give this to me, but we’re taught to be gracious while simultaneously being kicked around the manners pitch like a soccer ball.

I was not a greedy child; the idea of making Christmas lists and asking Santa for specific things left me cold, even when I was very young. I’d gape in horror at my friends who spoke openly of their want; I was the child of Depression-era people who made no room for neediness. One just smiled and said thank you. I am reminded here of my wife who, as a young and very reserved child, summoned the nerve to ask Santa for a record player and The Beach Boys' All Summer Long; Santa brought her a record player and The Beach Boys Song Book by The Hollyridge Strings. She thanked Santa very much, she tells me; it never would have occurred to her to say Hey, this isn’t The Beach Boys, even though her disappointment is as palpable now as it probably was sixty years ago.

(What she asked for…)

(What she got…)

At four years old, I didn’t want a pony, but I also didn’t want a fake turquoise cocktail ring. And yet, I had to pretend that I did and that I was completely overwhelmed with delight and amazement when it was given to me. Which I was not. Everyone knew I was not, except for the person who gave it to me, and she was so happy with my response that the following year, she gave me the matching brooch.

One of my distant, older cousins labeled me a weird child (not inaccurate) and therefore hard to gift — I wasn’t at all girly, go figure, and I didn’t much like dolls or other toys (beyond the usual 1960s games like Chutes & Ladders, and Lite-Brite and Operation), but I did love my EZ-Bake Oven, which maybe presaged my future work as a food writer. And when other cousins arrived at our apartment with a massive box of hundreds of powdered cake mixes made specifically for the EZ-Bake Oven, I was, according to my father, visibly and authentically thrilled. Somewhere around my tenth birthday, my father had begun to tell people Oh, she loves to read — just get her a book, and my relatives were apparently relieved. Unfortunately, this coincided with my beginning to be horrible at math, so at Christmas, a family friend presented me with a gift of four beautifully wrapped and ribboned volumes that I was made to open at a big gathering while everyone watched; three of them were a series of soft-covered long division workbooks, and the fourth, a hardcover textbook called Fun With Geometry.

I’m so thrilled that you like them! the family friend said, clapping her hands. Your daddy told us you wanted them!

Actually, my daddy probably suggested something along the lines of The Complete A.A. Milne, or The Wind in the Willows, or Black Beauty, or Heidi. My daddy probably did not suggest four math workbooks.

But I learned — we all learn, don’t we — early on how to respond appropriately, whether we’re happy or not, and so, for the next seven years, until I left for college, I would receive math textbooks from this person, for which I wrote formal notes that said Thank you so much for the wonderful math textbooks. I love them! If gifting involves inappropriate wearable items — communion gloves for a little girl who is not Catholic, or a fake turquoise cocktail ring while the child is still in single digits — things will only get weirder because it will be expected that she will wear those things the next time the gifter comes to visit. (See Ralphie and his pink bunny suit, above.)

Peculiar gifting doesn’t seem to stop with the passage of time: at one family party early in our relationship, my wife was re-gifted a plastic cruet set with a long hairline crack running down the side of the oil bottle. We talk about it to this day, and about the fact that she effusively thanked the giver and promised she’d start using it just as soon as she got home. One of my oldest friends, who is a little over six foot tall, once received a yellow and white striped robe for Christmas from someone who was not present at her home on Christmas morning, where I was visiting for the holiday; the robe was a petite size, and when my friend’s husband and I begged her to put it on and she did, most of the bottom of her bottom was exposed (she was wearing pajamas).

If gifting involves inappropriate wearable items, things will only get weirder because it will be expected that she will wear those things the next time the gifter comes to visit.

So, gifting has left a bad, nervous taste in my mouth for a very long time. That changed briefly when I turned thirteen, and my best friend invited me to spend Christmas with her family a few blocks from where we lived. On Christmas morning, we exchanged gifts: I gave her a series of books that I knew she would love (she did), and my friend handed me a tiny, beautifully wrapped box, and when I opened it, I couldn’t believe my eyes: in it lay a small, gold Victorian reindeer charm that she and her mother found in an antique store in the city. My friend had been given an allowance with which to buy gifts for her little brother and me; she searched all over creation for the NC Wyeth-illustrated edition of Treasure Island, which she knew her brother would love (he did). And then she and her mother wandered into a little antique store on University Place in Greenwich Village (it’s still there), and discovered a small gold reindeer charm, waiting to be taken home.

It was, and remains, one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received, not because I was praying for a golden reindeer. But this person knew me well enough to know that I would love it, and lo these forty-eighty years, I still do. During the years when I didn’t wear it (for one reason or another), I slipped a wire through its loop and hung it on our Christmas tree. But now, at sixty-one, I am wearing it again, and I always think of that Christmas in 1976 when I opened it in front of their tree and had to blink back tears. My friend and I fell out of touch many years ago; our lives took very different turns in very different ways, and we both understood instinctively that we would likely not grow older together. But when I wear that little gold reindeer around my neck, we are still thirteen, frozen in the amber of memory.

The reindeer has informed the way I gift, which I try and do with some level of thought and sincerity; otherwise, what’s the point? Without the personal, gifting becomes transactional, disconnected, tit-for-tat, and more about the giver than the receiver, which seems backward to me.

At this point in my life, I don’t expect that I will suddenly love being on the receiving end; all those years ago, the die was cast, and receiving still makes me squirm. But I have come to understand the truth about gifting: done with affection — even if it’s re-gifting, which can often be wonderful — it can mark place, time, and memory like little else.