Dispatches from the present
After weeks spent poring over gift guides with the pressure to find, or simply read about, the perfect gift until “gift guide fatigue” became real, this year’s entire Christmas shopping was done in less than an hour, with less than an hour to go before our deadline. I wrote this sitting at a pub in Cork City while my husband dashed around town trying to get through his entire list before the big event. Every year this routine makes me anxious and exhausted—the event of the Gift Exchange, the date and time that we have to be seated around the tree to give and receive, the event that we have to clear space for and organize our plans around.
It’s not that I dislike gifts themselves. In general I have a lot of patience for the awkwardness of giving and receiving unwanted or useless gifts. Indian hosts are constantly giving their guests pointless presents or goodie bags or forcing their friends and family to wear or eat things they do not need. I know people who resent this barrage of attention from aunts and uncles and grandparents, but it points to what makes gift-giving, the act itself, beautiful: you want to show someone that you love them, that you were thinking of them, that you want to take care of them, whether they feel like accepting your love or not. The unrequited nature of the gift is what makes it special.
Normally, then, gift-giving might well follow Jacques Derrida’s definition: that for a gift to be a gift it must involve “no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.” But as Anastasia Berg once pointed out in an advice column on celebrating Christmas as a Jew, nowhere is this less true than at Christmas, and especially the big event. (During my husband’s early broke years living in New York City he once completely emptied his bank account buying gifts and then made it to the airport to go home for the holidays on the charity of a cab driver.)
I have not been doing Christmas very long, but in my short career I have not known it to be the kind of event where one party spontaneously showers the other with affection and wrapping paper while the other party refuses and grumbles and finally acquiesces sheepishly. That would be a very familiar kind of gift “exchange,” one in which the gift may be returned at a different time and in a different form—but it is not the Christmas Gift Exchange. The one year I did not have gifts to offer was the year my parents hosted my in-laws in India for our wedding the week before Christmas, and I had been too busy to think about gifts. I was forgiven, but I am still sometimes reminded of how my wedding inconveniently disturbed the family’s usual Christmas plans.
The pressure of the Gift Exchange event doesn’t stem from the fact that all gifts cannot be of equal quality, or equally appreciated. While there is an argument to be made about wasteful spending on things that just get thrown out or regifted or the “deadweight loss” of gifts that end up in closets or attics or basements—who even has the space in their homes anymore?—let’s assume there is a value in this level of stuff-pileup, since the intent of the gift is not just for the recipient to enjoy the gift itself but for the door to remain open for future gifts and exchanges.
No: the pressure of the event is that it’s choreographed. The ritual of unwrapping must be made as much a to-do as possible, in order to be festive; multiple gifts must come in multiple boxes and bags to give the tree more volume. This planning—more so than the difference in valuation between the giver and the receiver—is what truly devalues gifts: during the event, the gift does not, as Walter Benjamin said it must, “affect the receiver to the point of shock.”
I know the things we do can’t always be spontaneous in this way, especially when it comes to religious rituals. Hindu ceremonies are all like this: you go through the motions and this mindless repetition is its own comforting, meaningful, perhaps even sacred process. You recite words to things you don’t understand in a language you don’t know; you memorize hand motions involving garlands and incense and idols. You have to pretend to care, or not, but you have to suck it up and do things that are boring or pointless, and that is what makes it an important occasion. But this series of rehearsed motions is not, I presume, how anyone thinks about the Christmas Gift Exchange. The ritual turns the gift exchange into a performance just like a pooja, except with all the extra stuff.
The need to adhere to this performance is why my husband doesn’t like to give me my gift before we leave for Ireland even though it would save baggage space and fuss; it’s why he refuses to give gifts signed from the both of us if he’s picked them out himself, and it’s why the gifts we all have gotten each other have to be kept out of sight until the Gift Exchange event even if we have all already been living together at his parents’ house for a week. One year my sister-in-law was late to the Gift Exchange because she wanted her cards and wrapping done perfectly; when I told her it seemed more important for us to be together on Christmas than in our individual chambers with wrapping paper, she looked at me blankly.
This is, perhaps, a different kind of that familiar unwanted love that I must begrudgingly accept. Later, the interaction made me think of a line from Charles Comey’s 2015 essay on honeymoons for this magazine: “The strange and tricky thing about a honeymoon is that even while it’s happening, it’s already lived as a story. We sit inside it saying, ‘We will have been here.’” This feels true of the performance of gift-giving, too. We want to give gifts, but when it comes to the event, we want to engage in the familiar ritual, that is, we want to be giving gifts; and we want the comfort of going through with the performance, the knowledge of having given gifts.
For what it’s worth, what I really want for Christmas, as cheesy as it sounds, is to know what it’s like without all the gifts in the way. Perhaps first that requires we get each other gifts in a more spontaneous way, for no reason at all, all year round, as often as it happens that we come across something that made us think of a loved one. Whatever the alternative, it must allow us to come together for Christmas to do something more—forgive me—religious. Because when I think about what the joy of Christmas could be, I don’t really want memories of last-minute shopping and fruitless hours spent trying to tie a ribbon into a perfect bow. What I want is for once to go to midnight mass. I want to go caroling, or at least to sing together and for each other. I want us to pray, whatever that looks like (and when my father-in-law laments that Henry Kissinger died before he could be punished for his sins, I want not to be laughed at when I say that he may yet be punished). I want to serve at the soup kitchen down the street for a few hours. I want to create new, unfamiliar rituals, together. They might end up dull and familiar eventually, and we might end up doing them begrudgingly, but to me right now, they sound light as air, almost miraculous.