During the holiday season a lot of conversations with my female friends center on the burden of shopping for gifts. Our obligations have spread with American affluence and the ready availability of personal credit. Now we are expected to exchange remembrances with professional colleagues, fellow book club members, the mailman, the hair dresser, and our neighbors. Tonight Michele and I are invited to a dinner with casual acquaintances we haven't seen for over a year and the focal point of the evening is the ubiquitous White Elephant event where everybody re-gifts gifts they didn't like the first time around, as if once wasn't bad enough. Ho-ho-ho.
I was part of that mentality once, the one that implies that caring is measured by yards of ribbon and wrapping paper. But that was before February 14, 2002.
It was our second St. Valentine's Day as a couple. I tracked down a baby-sitter for the kids and made reservations for the Cincinnati Zoo's annual event on animal mating rituals, which I thought would interest my science-oriented husband. That day I bought heart-shaped cupcake pans, and spent the afternoon personalizing each little cake in confectioner's sugar. Then I constructed a lovely display with Valentine cards and small wrapped gifts to show my new family how much I loved them and that there was no limit to what I was willing to do to show it.
Michele walked in the door a few minutes after I finished, took one look, and said, "Oh, I didn't know we were celebrating."
Anger is not an emotion that is encouraged in Midwestern America. So it took a while for me to register exactly how furious I was. But I figured it out somewhere between the nocturnal house and the hot fudge sundaes. I had gone to a lot of trouble. I'd done the wash and cooked the dinners and attended too many g-rated movies to count. And Michele hadn't even bought me a card.
He tried to take me out to dinner to make it up to me. But my meal tasted like sand. I walked home in the rain by myself, Michele driving slowly along the curb until he finally gave up and went ahead to relieve our baby-sitter.
The next morning I woke up. I realized I had a choice. I could either badger Michele into doing holidays the way we'd always done them in my family with twenty packages on the mantel for every celebration, so many of them they were almost always forgotten in relatively short-order. Or I could convert to the way Michele was brought up, where presents were not demands but intensely special exchanges to be treasured on the rare and unexpected occasions they occurred. When I thought about how much time and energy I'd invested in the gift of giving over the years, the weight of which always seems to tip more heavily on the responsibilities of women, I realized it was a contest I would never, ever win.
Now Michele and I go out to dinner to celebrate. Sometimes we get each other cards. Sometimes we don't. This year we've bought a new house and I got to furnish it the way I want, so there's not one more thing I want for Christmas. Really. But I got Michele a few items he'd never buy for himself. To all my neighbors, friends, and the lady who cuts my hair, I promise not to get you anything if you do the same for me. Time together, freely given, is enough, don't you think?
Some day, if we're lucky, maybe one of us will get a present like the one Michele got from his mother when he was a teenager and there wasn't a lot of money for extras. He wanted a transistor radio to listen to the Top 40 program, and the family didn't have one. When she finally gave it to him six months after he mentioned it, it wasn't wrapped. They were sitting on the edge of her bed and she handed him the small orange appliance, an event so special he remembers it like it was yesterday, the tone of his voice almost reverential as he describes it.
Real presents aren't duties or party tricks. They come from one heart to another without expectation.
Buon Natale a Tutti.
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