The 2008 Brief Guide to Gifting:
Instructions for the Barely Intermediate Shopper
I know. I know. You're not ready. I'm not ready, either. But we owe it to the economic recovery of our great nation to make even some small effort to open those holiday catalogues and order stuff made in China to exchange with each other. According to the financial runes, this retail season promises to be the slowest in the last two decades. Thus, we must overcome our inertia and dedicate ourselves to stimulating the economy. But more on the Vermont Country Christmas Catalogue later…
This is my Third Shopping Guide. In 2006, we started off with "It Is Better to Give: A Brief Guide to Gifting." There, I introduced you to the fundamental principles of holiday gift giving. I encourage you to take a moment to review and pay particular attention to Principle Number One: Do NOT take your lover along when you go shopping for your fiancé/husband/wife/life partner. Really. Don't.
Last year, we kicked it up a notch in "The 2007 Brief Guide to Gifting: A Primer for Advanced Beginners (Parts One and Two)". That was a comprehensive instructional manual designed to help you learn to assess a variety of gift options and distinguish a good gift choice from a bad gift choice (your welcome). I also reiterated the importance of NOT taking your lover along when you go shopping for your fiancé/husband/wife/life partner.
Yes. That's right. I'm still bitter.
While I understand that you would like to crawl into your Suspended Animation Pod that you got from Sharper Image LAST Christmas, and stay there in a lightly vegetative state until you can emerge, refreshed, after this holiday is over, I'm afraid that is not an option. Let's be brave about this and gird our loins, because a) we are Americans and we've shopped through difficult times before and b) there are lots of tantalizing gifts for loins this season.
Now, I know The 2008 Brief Guide to Gifting, etc., may seem a bit early and you may be settling into your respective recliners in a turkey stupor. But the three days following Thanksgiving are, traditionally, the busiest shopping days of the year. While I don't think one night is enough to effectively prepare you to enter the retail system, either on-line or in person, I hope to control some of the gifting damage on the front end.
So, altogether now, let's start off by seeing what Catalogue Santa has brought us. On the top of my growing stack is "Gifts of Service" from the Seva Foundation followed by Heifer International, which offer gifts of livestock to impoverished villages. Brookstone, "A World of Innovation", merchandises a plethora of gadget gifts while The Vermont Country Store advertises itself as a "catalogue of goods and wares." And the assorted foodie catalogues are pouring in with their tantalizing offers of mundane groceries dressed up to seduce you into believing that giving a $200 miniature oak cask holding 16 ounces of 150-year-old balsamic vinegar is the perfect gift (it's not - no salad dressing gives that much joy).
Now that you have passed into the ranks of intermediate gifting, you may be aware that your shopping is changing. Maybe you are experiencing strange impulses to give an alternative gift or contribute to a socially conscious cause in the name of your giftee. Far be it from me to discourage you from being the change you want to see in the world, and all that. Seva's brochure promises "Over 20 POWERFUL gifts inside!" while Heifer encourages you to give the Gift of a Pig, or a share of a pig if you only want to buy a stocking stuffer. But as your guide, I want to point out some potential problems that you might encounter if you decide to yield to the angels of your better nature.
First off, while you may be a fully conscious individual who wants to spread the true meaning of Christmas by bringing a skilled midwife to a poor Mayan village, your giftee may be flipping through brochures for a Yucatan Pyramid Cruise. There, she or he can view genuine poor Mayan villages when the Caribbean Princess docks at Playa del Carmen. Seva promises that your generous donation will change someone's life, but your giftee may well expect that your gift will make that change by way of a cashmere coat in their closet or a massage chair undulating over their lumbar.
While I applaud you choosing to give altruistic gifts, I caution you that you might want to have a back up plan when your child opens a card and discovers, not a gift certificate for an iTouch, but a note thanking him or her for buying a girl in Poland a herd of goats.
Also, you might want to remember that to Americans the gift of an animal is akin to giving a pet or something cute to love. Heifer International shows page after page of celebrities cuddling bunnies and caressing guinea pigs and chicks. But although the ads are brimming with the affirmation of life, these fuzzy wuzzies are not intended to provide psychological comfort to their recipients. While some livestock may have a limited run as draft animals or sources of secondary commodities like wool and milk in the less prosperous corners of the world, the end game is the same. Their mission is not to provide companionship for the poor. And there are no photos of the gift guinea pig being roasted on a stick.
If your giftee is sensitive, as children and vegetarians often are, they may not be filled with Christmas joy when they realize that their gift, a trio of rabbits to a Nepalese family, is destined to be made into stew.
Gifts from Brookstone are at the opposite end of the Compassionate Giving universe and have inherent hazards as well. I do not recommend shopping from Brookstone until you have developed the sort of confidence that comes with solid intermediate gifting skills. Inasmuch as you can completely miss your mark by giving a village a midwife instead of giving jewelry to your real wife, you can be-gadget someone beyond their ability to appreciate the spiffiness of the UV Light Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer or the Motorized Grill Brush.
For example, if I were to open my Christmas gift and find Brookstone's Motion Activated Night Light Coaster, I would be ambivalent. On one hand, I think I could appreciate a night light coaster that turns on with just a wave of my hand, and then turns off automatically after 30 seconds. It produces a soft ambient light, is water resistant (a handy feature for a coaster) and is cordless. This is the coolest night light coaster I have ever seen. Of course, my next question is what in the hell am I going to do with a night light coaster? When I'm asleep, I don't much worry about using a coaster. I suppose I could take some comfort in knowing that if I ever needed a midnight coaster I could find it in the dark by merely waving, but, somehow, I don't think I'll ever be awake to enjoy it.
What I'm saying is that the gifter must be cautious to avoid projection when it comes to gifting gadgets. Your fancy might be taken when you feast your gaze on Brookstone's Golf Club Dispenser - it looks like a driver, but its secret is the one-button, battery operated drink pump that dispenses both hot and cold beverages. The blurb says it's "discreet." I'm not sure how unobtrusive you can be when you're squeezing your golf club and a stream of Chivas comes splurting out into your highball glass, but okay. Apparently, you want to get hammered and pretend that no one else notices that you are sucking on your driver. Just keep in mind that your other golfing friends carry their hooch in stainless steel sports bottles. Give your buddy the Golf Drink Dispenser and he might think you're sort of a golf geek instead of the cool-man-on-the-course.
And that brings me to The Vermont Country Store Christmas Catalogue. If you have it sitting in a pile somewhere, turn to page 34. See something different?
The Vermont Country Store, for those of you off the junk-mail list, is a catalogue company that serves the needs of people who liked things just as they were before 1960. I think they are selling nostalgia, but I can't think who they are selling it to. I have friends in their 70s and 80s and they never offer me ribbon candy or want to show me their new flannel sleep caps. My older friends are wearing yoga pants to their Siddha class, eating vegetarian Thai and just hitting their stride as artists, community organizers and healers. They aren't looking to find a reliable source of Munsingwear and chenille bedspreads.
I can practically smell the Ambush and Evening in Paris drifting up from the page that promises "a memory in every bottle", suggesting that these would be good memories of happy times. Just looking at the catalogue makes me feel like I've aged fifty years and wonder if I'm feeling a draft. But there must be a consumer demand somewhere for dreary goods because VCS has been in business for quite awhile selling the same old tired stuff from the same old tired newsprint catalogue with nary a hint of progress since forever.
Until this Christmas. I don't know what's going on in Vermont, but flannel sleepwear has met its seductive match. Somewhere in between the gingham chair pads and the cranberry glass candy dish and the electric nose hair trimmer, VCS has a two-page section offering "Intimate Solutions for…The Next Stage in Your Life." Understand that the page preceding it offered a splint to ease the pressure of painful bunions and the page after it sold three different kinds of cod liver oil. But pages thirty-four and thirty-five are devoted to pleasure devices.
Not too long ago, offering these types of products through the United States mail was an illegal distribution of smut. It was part of a sleazy trade, even though collections found in the antiquities sections of many museums indicate that there is nothing new under this particular sun (except electricity, of course). The postal service is less puritanical than it used to be, but to have a Hitachi Massaging Wand displayed in the same catalogue that sells Lavoris and genuine Vermont maple syrup just blows my mind.
If you are an intermediate gifter, your antennae are quivering and you are already sensing a contradiction. The Vermont Country Store is a respectable gift catalogue known for offering goods so bland that even the included Lambchop puppet seems kind of flamboyant. But, surely VCS has done some sort of market research and isn't making such a scandalous addition to their Christmas gift-giving catalogue unless they have every confidence that the women on your Secret Santa list very much want Kegel exercisers or something similar.
While I would encourage you to either find a catalogue or go on-line just for the amusement of reading the extravagant-yet-vague advertising copy..."Synergy Pleasure System," "intensity adjustments," "Ergonomically Designed with 10 Speeds" (for going uphill, I guess), "Extremely Cushiony" ...I do not recommend buying anything shown on pages thirty-four or thirty five as a Christmas gift unless you plan to tape cruise tickets to it.
Kama Sutra-type gifts need a lot of context if they are to be received playfully and you, the barely intermediate gifter, may be working without a net. Without good instincts you will likely be staring at a cold shoulder in a flannel nightgown until the spring thaw. That said, all is not lost…keep reading and proceed cautiously...there may be an alternative to The Vermont Country Store a few paragraphs further on.
Now that we're ready to sew our Intermediate Shopping Badges onto our sleeves, I believe that we are sufficiently prepared to explore two gifting areas that, like Pluto, orbit around with the gift system, but have been demoted from full inclusion. These are Food Gifts and their natural extension, Gifts of the Month.
As you may remember from last year, I am under-whelmed by elaborate food gifts. Just because it's the holiday season, I see no need to take a perfectly good fruit like a pear, dip it in chocolate, swaddle it in gold foil and lay it in a little gilt sled for $30. I say, "Don't mess with pears!" Pears are good all on their own and you can often get them for free.
As you may imagine, I am also opposed to Exotic Salt Samplers and Weird Pimentos of the World gift sets. As a gift consultant, I can promise you that no one loves pears, salt or pimentos so much that they wriggle with pleasure when they open a present and find pears, salt or pimentos, no matter how artfully they are packaged. Food gifts have a whiff of desperation about them that's hard to conceal.
That said, however, there may be some entertainment value in esoteric food gifts if you play it right. For example, back in the early 1990s, when your average food stores were nowhere near the grocery-paloozas they are today, sending Harry and David steroid inflated grapefruits or a box of Turkish figs offered novelty, if not outright joy, to the recipient. One Christmas, I saw an ad in the back of a magazine for a "Potato of the Month Club" and I thought my boss might appreciate something as goofy as a monthly delivery of gourmet potatoes.
My gift was actually a big hit - not that one potato variety was distinctively different than any other. No one had such a sophisticated palate that they savored a bite and proclaimed, "Hmmm... the Bintje potato has a distinctively mossy flavor with undertones of truffles and loam. It is best enjoyed as a French fry made with organic canola oil and Caspian Sea salt, but is inferior for gratins which are better suited to a more robust Yellow Finn." The lowly potato does not offer much opportunity for gustatory snobbery.
But once a month, we got a box of nicely packaged potatoes that we micro-waved in the kitchen. Someone went out for fixin's. Someone else went out for beer. Sometimes my boss actually got some of his potatoes, and sometimes not, but what made it a very good gift was that it came every month and there was enough to share. If you have the right sort of giftee, food gifts can be quite successful.
Because of the internet, you can probably satisfy just about any whim of the foodie on your list if you are willing to pay a few bucks. If you haven't checked into this lately, you may be amazed to discover that unnaturally colored fruits wrapped in red cellophane are largely extinct, but there has been an explosion in what you can gift for year-round monthly delivery, both edible and non-edible.
If you visit a site like Gourmet Gifts of the Month or Month Club Store, you will discover that you can gift a monthly subscription for pickles, chips and salsa, olives, cheesecake, soup, pizza, dog treats, beef jerky, potato chips, popcorn, wine and beer, lobster, pasta, soda pop, breakfast and peanut butter/jelly. Did you know that you can give the pork lover in your life a monthly gift of Artisan Bacon from Grateful Palate?
Oh, yes. The purchase of a single $150 subscription will buy the following:
- A different artisan bacon delivered to your door each month for 12 months
- Informative notes on all bacon selections
- Discounts on The Grateful Palate bacon products and bacons
- Bacon of the Month Club Membership Card
- The Bacon Strip - our members only monthly bacon comic strip
- The Bacon of the Month Club Pig Ballpoint Pen
- A little Rubber Toy Pig
- One free Bacon Tee Shirt
- A recipe each month using the bacon selected
- Discounts on suggested wines and products in recipes
- And - new for 2008 - a pig nose!
If you are not inclined to gift food, consider the Puzzle, Cigar, Necktie, Teddy Bear, Soap, Bath or Handbag of the Month Clubs.
And those items you saw featured in The Vermont Country Store? Can you have those delivered on a monthly basis? I'm so glad you asked. The on-line company, Romance 365 offers 3, 6 and 12-month subscriptions along with custom gift baskets and poses the question, "Are you in the market for a new sex toy every month?"
I'll leave you to ponder that question on your own.
May your shopping be fruitful and may you strike the right balance between material and spiritual this holiday season. As always, the really important gifts are the gifts of the heart...anything else is just entertainment.
Note: Just so you won't be disappointed, you should know that The Vermont Country Store has sent out at least two different Christmas catalogues this year that feature different merchandise. The items that I referred to on pages 34 and 35 are featured in one, but not in the other.
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© 2009 Ingrid Gabriel
Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."
Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com
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