I’m going to tell you the secret behind successful holiday shopping. And it’s contrary to everything you have learned.
They tell you that when you’re giving a gift, you should give the other person what they like, not what you like. Well, that credo is exactly, one hundred percent, wrong.
I used to do my holiday shopping just that way. I’d pass up beautiful stuff that any sane person would love and I’d waste good money on stupid junk. The rationale was that if they were happy, I was happy.
But I wasn’t.
I recognized this credo as codependency in disguise. I was enabling bad taste and bad judgment. Now, I am codependent no more. If they want Big Mouth Billy Bass, they have to buy it themselves.
And worse, I used to ask people what they wanted, which was the biggest no-no ever. Every Christmas, I would ask my mother, and she would tell me. Problem was, everything my mother wanted was impossible to find.
One year, she wanted a knit poncho. Another year, a nightgown with no elastic at the wrists. A third, a perfume she remembered from World War II, called Pois De Senteur, which I think translates to Peas of Health. I gave up after six stores and bought her a bottle of Joy. Her Christmas was joyless.
Then I wised up.
I stopped asking her what she wanted and started getting her what I wanted. And the ironic part is, I learned this from my mother herself.
My mother never gave me what I wanted for Christmas, but gave me only what she wanted. For example, when I was in middle and high school, she fell in love with what she called “estate jewelry.” To this day, I have no idea what “estate jewelry” really means. I don’t think she did, either. I bet she liked the “estate” part, which sounds classy. If you put “estate” together with “jewelry,” you get a mental image of glittery people in tuxes, swanning around mansions. But in truth, I suspect that the term refers to jewelry left by someone who has died, which nobody in her family wanted, even though it was free.
Do you understand the significance of this?
In other words, even if her family loved this woman, they didn’t want that jewelry, which should give you an excellent idea of what estate jewelry looks like, or, at least, the estate jewelry that my mother picked out for me. She gave me a bronze brooch shaped like a spiked sun. A snake bracelet, complete with scales and a forked tongue, that curled around my upper arm. A pendant with a blue ceramic eye in the center.
The kind of junk that turned my jewelry chest into Pandora’s box.
Back then, my mother gave me estate jewelry like it was going out of style, which it was, by definition. Undoubtedly, it cost way too much of her secretary’s salary, so I opened my presents from her with a guilty and sinking heart. On the bright side, I had the best brooch collection of any thirteen-year-old, ever.
I know I sound like a terrible person, whining about this, but here’s the point, about why you should buy people what you want:
Because now, over time, my thinking has changed, and so has my taste in many things. Today I look at the jewelry she gave me through the lens of perspective and maturity. Do I still find it unbelievably ugly?
Of course.
I would sooner go braless in the emergency room than wear one of those brooches, and we both know how I feel about emergency-room bralessness.
But nevertheless, now I treasure each one of these pieces of jewelry. Each one of them has enormous sentimental value to me. Each one reminds me that my mother spent money on me that she didn’t have. Each one tells me how much she loves me. Each is the best present I could have gotten, for that holiday or any holiday.
And why?
Because my mother gave me things that she loved. So when I look at all that awful stuff, I see what I love the most.
Her.