Gifting & Gifting & Gifting & . . .
The Source
Gifting & Gifting & Gifting & . . . I’ll never forget the sight of my first one. It was a black and orange Monarch. Not the butterfly but the bicycle. There were two of them bookending our Christmas tree in the early 1950’s and my brother and I knew that Santa had got this one right. The training wheels extended all the way to the wall and the sofa, and even though there was snow on the ground we were ready to ride, baby. We soon found that the protruding axels of the trainers played havoc with woodwork around the doorways, but somehow Dad and Mom allowed it. Gift giving at Christmas has a less than holy history. Although Christians often claim that it commemorates the gifts given to the Christ child by the Magi, the tradition actually dates back to the Raucous Romans who would celebrate their god of Agriculture, Saturn. Saturnalia began on December 17th and was the kickoff for week’s worth of heavy drinking and fooling around in a Roman way. It was a winter holiday to raise their glasses and their togas. Even though most scholars peg spring as the season of Christ’s birth, Christmas was pushed into December in an attempt to push out the booze and hanky-panky. In large part the idea worked although I’m sure that some yuletide celebrations still contain plenty of the aforementioned activities. Our Pilgrim fathers (and mothers) pretty much snuffed out any Christmas spirit that might have been hanging around New England in our nation’s earliest days. You could be punished if someone found you celebrating Christmas, but somewhere in the 1680’s things loosened up a bit and gift giving kicked back into gear. In recent years we’ve sped things up to high gear as one-third of holiday spending still isn’t paid off two months after Christmas, and the cost of gifts given that are never used has been estimated to be $12 billion. That’s a lot of ugly sweaters and boring books. My family wasn’t much different than any other clans in our little village. We tried to spend on others just about what we assumed others would spend on us. One of the most memorable gifts I remember was when Dad bought Mom a chainsaw for Christmas. He climaxed the holiday dinner by starting the thing up in the living room, giving us a truly blue Christmas with the haze of spent fuel filled the air. Mother was not impressed. I had an uncle who would annually buy his wife some sort of appliance that required a certain amount of work on her part. . . a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher, a car washing kit. When our extended family would meet for the “big dinner” we anxiously awaited Aunt Alberta to open her gift. Mom would remind her sister, “At least you didn’t get a chainsaw.” It’s been a tradition in my Lincoln Land Traveling Theatre class to hold a Christmas party where everyone has a Secret Santa, but the stickler is that you must make the gift yourself. This drives some teens crazy, having been brought up in a society in which they could buy just about anything they needed. Make it? Are you serious? How am I supposed to do that? The result has been some of the mostly truly creative gifts I’ve ever scene. Some of the most memorable theatre class gifts have included a portrait by a girl with artistic skills, a wall hanging made out of horseshoes for a young lady who loves her horses, photo montages of the gifter and the giftee together, a promise of car detailing, a going-to-college kit chock-full of candy bars, cookies, crackers and chips, and an assortment of quilted, crocheted, and sewn thing-a-ma-bobs. Back when I was in the classroom every day I was the happy recipient of some pretty strange Christmas gifts, and one sticks out particularly in my mind. A young man came up to me at the end of school on the final day before Christmas break and said, “Did you get my present?” I admitted that I didn’t remember receiving anything from him. He said, “Well, I sort of hid it from you. I put it in your desk drawer.” My students knew that my teacher’s desk was not so much an instructional tool as a landing area for everything in the classroom. I sat behind it once and no one could see me. So on this Christmas I walked over to desk, pulled out drawer after drawer until I found the young man’s present. He’d given me an ice cream bar. . . two days ago. I would dread being a parent trying to buy gifts for today’s kids with the assortment being so wide and the fads changing by the week. Any parent knows that the old saying, “It’s the thought that counts” does not apply to five-year-olds. Thankfully, our tastes change. My grandpa used to buy a pair of gloves for each of his grandkids. I thought this a rather “der” gift when I was ten. Now I really miss those gloves. May you remember this Christmas that the greatest gift cost us nothing, and it beats the heck out of a chainsaw.