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Submitted by BoingBoing Gadgets on December 23rd, 2008

Holiday gift-giving has a timing problem. The best gifts are not those that you find when going down a list of names, checking off each one as you toss something good enough into a cart, but the gifts that call
out someone’s name when you aren’t even shopping at all.

My mother goes the opposite direction. All year long she lays up supplies for unforeseen but inevitable gift crises, stacking her closets and garage with literal piles of goods she got on sale but with no intention other than the possibility of giving them away in the future. (This is why it is not uncommon to receive a gift from my mother that is two or three years old, especially when one of the piles loses integrity and sheers off a face of cheap toys and baby clothing to reveal a rich vein of comedy DVDs and paperbacks.)

Fortunately, Mom’s a pretty good gift giver, so she only uses those items as filler, or as a gift to one of the dozens of extended family members to whom she feels a giftly duty. Her primary gifts, the ones
she’s proud of, are the weird ones that somehow intersect with her family’s quirks. One year I unwrapped a box with a starter bagpipe set, which was perfect: I was genuinely intrigued by it, but never would have bought it one my own.

I don’t actually buy gifts for all my family and friends every year. That is in part because I’m an uncaring jerk, but also because I hate giving something just for the sake of it. I’d rather send a card (or
more likely a text message or email) to remind people that they’re being thought of than something that they’re not going to cherish. By the same token, some years I may spend several hundred dollars on a
gift for one person, while the next year I might not get them anything much at all. Capricious, maybe, but at least it keeps them guessing!

What would be optimal would be a hybrid of both my mother and my systems: an ongoing acquisition of gifts throughout the year as the spirit moves me. It’s just that I so often am not thinking of others
when I’m out browsing the aisles on a hot June day, and perhaps that’s a lesson for me to remember: the whole point of buying a gift for someone is to memorialize your feelings for them, to make them happier
in some small way, and that should be happening all year long. And you can’t do that by giving them something they’re just going to throw away.

Submitted by Nathan on December 23rd, 2008

As a child I never paid attention to the gifts my parents gave to each other. Their gifts were always boring, utilitarian or unremarkable. My Father was also not known for his gift giving prowess, and so my Mother usually ended up with little home-made trinkets, candy, and toys that ended up back in the hands of the gift-giver.

One Christmas, while we sat around the tree laughing and enjoying each others company, my Mother received a large heavy box from my Father, the only present from him that year. As we sat there watching my poor Mother open that box, none of us realized the extent to which my Father had failed that year. Inside the poorly wrapped package was a box of staples. More staples than a person could use in their lifetime (my Mother still has these staples.)My Mother stood and left the room, the silence was too uncomfortable for a group of young children and we soon were back to our own gifts, purchased, thankfully, by our Mother.

It’s been years, and my family laughs about this now. But it’s still a bittersweet laughter, because even after 15 more years, my Father really hasn’t improved much.

Submitted by DVD Talk on December 23rd, 2008

When it comes to giving gifts, some people think I’m lazy and don’t put much thought into it, blindly grabbing whatever is at hand and wrapping it. Alas, just the opposite is true. I agonize over what to get everyone from my close friends to my sister who lives in Spain. (Spain?!? What could she possibly want? Do you know what they do for fun there? They let bulls chase people through the streets. Not criminals or anything either, the people volunteer!) Even after I’ve found something the agony doesn’t stop. I’ll frequently stay up nights wondering if the gift I had already purchased was really the best of all possible gifts.

Then I came up with The System. Like all leaps of genius, it is controversial and some say it is the creation of a mad man. To those rare few who can grasp its elegance and simplicity however, The System is a miracle that cuts down on the time, worry, and even the expense of holiday shopping.

Here’s how it works: In early November create a list of everyone you would like to give a gift to. Put this away and don’t think about.

On December 24^th, get up, go to the bank and take out the sum total of your budget in cash, then head to the largest mall in the area. Buy presents for everyone on the list.

It’s so straightforward! You don’t have to spend months worrying about what to get someone on your list… even if you come up with the prefect gift, a can of bull repellent for my sister maybe, they aren’t going to have it in stock anyway. So why worry about it? You know for a fact you’ll be done shopping in a few hours, because there is no more time. There’s absolutely no hoping to find something better at a later date. There is no later date.

The System also forces you to be creative in a way that shopping in early December when items are still in stock just doesn’t. With only things that no one else in the entire country wants on the shelves, it’s a bit easier to let yourself think outside of the box. I enjoy giving “why was this made” presents. One of the better gifts I’ve given a ceramic tea set that was made to look like it was crafted out of wicker. Now think about that for a moment. Why would anyone want a tea set made of wicker? No one would. But someone, somewhere, decided to take it one step further and make a FAKE wicker set. To what purpose? So you can fool your friends? Is whicker some kind of status symbol that I missed out on? This is a great gift because not only is it useful, but it’s a conversation piece like few others. So take my advice and relax in November and December and then blindly panic on Christmas Eve.

image by House Of Sims

Submitted by Outblush on December 29th, 2008

You wouldn’t tell a friend that she needs to drop 40 pounds as quickly as she can, or inform another friend that her anger-jealously problems need to be taken care of in a timely fashion. So why tell them with a gift? Trust us, no matter how hot a diet is (South Beach! Atkins! Hamptons!), it is not cool to buy someone the accompanying diet book. And believe us when we say that no one appreciates getting a self-help book. It doesn’t matter if it’s on “Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior” or “Breaking the Emotional Bad Habits That Make You Miserable,” nobody likes it when others think they need improving. Just be a friend to these folks, ask if there’s anything you can help them with, and buy them a damn candle set already.

image by tanakawho

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 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

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…