Submitted by Alison Storm on December 30th, 2008

You’ve got one. Everyone does. That person on your gift list that is absolutely impossible to shop for. Mine is my mother– she’s the woman who has everything and anything she doesn’t have she just buys for herself anyway. She’s a collector of stuff– bird houses, antique door stoppers, stuffed animals– so you’d think that would make her easy to buy for, but it doesn’t. Here’s an example.

As a kid I started to buy her Snowbabies. They are tiny cherub-like figurines taking part in winter-time activities like building snowmen, pulling a sled or making snow angels. Their $20 price point makes them the perfect “mom” gift for kids whose income is comprised solely of a weekly allowance. So for a few blissful years Snowbabies were my go-to gift. I don’t know if the collection was growing too slowly for my mother’s impatient taste or if her passion for the chubby statuettes was just too intense but the little things started multiplying. Soon my mother’s collection rivaled that of the inventory at the gift store in the mall that sold them and I could no longer tell which ones she owned and which ones she didn’t. So I gave up. Snowbabies were no longer my thing– they were hers. READ THE REST…

Submitted by Alison Storm on December 30th, 2008

Fifty bucks doesn’t go that far when you’re a newlywed shopping for your husband. I really can’t blame anyone but myself because that $50 limit idea– it was mine. I just figured with all of the expenses of the wedding and the honeymoon and starting our lives together that $50 would be plenty. But when you throw in the pressure of trying to find the perfect gift for our first Christmas as a married couple, well, let’s just say $50 may as well be a nickel.

I settled on a pair of clearance snowboarding gloves, marked down to $30 since they were last year’s style. That left me with just enough money for an ab ball. I know– not very romantic but it seemed like a good gift given my husband’s passion for working out. Since we were flying across the country to spend time with my family out west, only the compact gifts were allowed to come along. So he opened the ab ball before our departure. The gloves would be his Christmas morning surprise.

Somewhere between South Carolina and Seattle my husband’s bag was lost. READ THE REST…

Submitted by Alison Storm on December 30th, 2008

Have you ever noticed how tough it can be to buy presents for people outside of your own age bracket? I never quite know what my 80-year-old grandfather would like. Does he really want another pair of slippers? And since I don’t have children myself, I find it hard to tell what toys are just right for my three-year-old second cousin. Is he too young for an ant farm? Well, I don’t think I’m the only one with this problem. In fact, I know I’m not.

Let me take you back to my freshman year of college. The year is 1998. Google just launched. The Euro made its debut and boy bands had reached the peak of their success. I was living the life that most college kids enjoy: sleep, class, eat, Jerry Springer, class, eat, sleep. I lived in a mint green house with five roommates. Our kitchen was invaded by fruit flies and the dirty dishes often outnumbered the clean ones. The shower pressure rivaled the flow from a drain pipe on a drizzly day. A Dawson’s Creek poster was our featured piece of living room artwork.

When Christmas rolled around I was likely hoping for more baby doll t-shirts (with slogans like, I’m here, what are your other two wishes), a Ricky Martin CD, and if I was really lucky, a laptop complete with a floppy drive and 64 megabytes of RAM. Maybe my grandma never got my wish list. Or maybe she was just trying to help me into the world of adulthood. READ THE REST…

Submitted by Alison Storm on December 18th, 2008

I have a small circle of high school friends. Even though we live in five different states we work hard to keep in touch. We exchange phone calls and e-mails and birthday cards. We’ve forked over big bucks for bridesmaid dresses for each other’s weddings. We’ve spent large chunks of our paychecks on plane tickets to Vegas for our annual gathering. And every year we buy each other Christmas presents, carefully wrap them up, and ship them off as another way to show our friendship.

But this year one of girls in this intimate circle (we’ll call her Friend B) decided that with the state of the economy our decade-old tradition of exchanging Christmas gifts should be halted. Friend B’s e-mail read,

‘the main thing that I wanted to bring up is the gift exchange thing. I know that every year I feel very strapped financially and I also don’t have as much time to shop for great gifts as I would like… so I was thinking that maybe we should not exchange gifts this year due to all of the economic strain and all of us having not as much free time as we would like. What do you think about this idea? If you still really want to do the gift thing let me know, but I will just have to do small items.’ READ THE REST…