“What do you want for Christmas?” “A powder-blue Alfa Romeo.” “Very funny. Seriously, what do you want for Christmas?”
“Whatever you’d like to give me.”
“Well, I want to give you something you’d like to receive.”
“And I want to receive whatever you think you’d like to give me. You don’t actually have to give me anything. ”
“Of course I do. So what do you want?”
Round and round it goes, the asking of this terrible question. Personally, I’ve been trying to discourage it for at least a decade (see above), but nonetheless, every yuletide, up it comes. The children ask me what I want. They ask their father. They ask each other. Their father occasionally asks me what I want. And — hypocrisy alert! — I’m pretty sure that I sometimes ask it, too.
And why not, you might wonder? Surely inquiring about what people want springs from tenderheartedness toward them. We simply want to choose gifts that they will genuinely welcome. Don’t we all secretly want to be the agent of our loved ones’ holiday delight?
Well, sure. Bald practicality has a role here, too. With limited funds, it seems prudent to direct resources toward presents that will yield maximum satisfaction. What better gifts than those that have been prescreened and preapproved by the customer, er, recipient?
The trouble is, coming up with suggestions for one’s own gifts makes the whole business far too bloodlessly transactional. I tell you what I want, you buy (or make) it for me, wrap it up, and hand it over on Christmas morning — or during Hanukkah or Festivus or Winterval, whenever that is. The farce concludes with me removing the wrapping and feigning surprise at the manifestation of the thing I’d ordered upon your request.
A roomful of people pretending to be delighted by foregone conclusions does not, I think, evoke the nostalgic Currier & Ives atmosphere to which many families aspire.
What’s that old saying? Something about it being the thought that counts? The truth is, the person who needs to do the thinking is the giver, not the recipient. After all, the chief pleasure of receiving gifts does not come from the objects themselves — though that Alfa Romeo would definitely bring joy — but in the sweetness of knowing that it was chosen for you. And I’m afraid that requires effort on the part of the giver.
Where children’s wish lists are concerned, I confess to granting an exception. The U.S. Postal Service has been delivering Christmas letters to the North Pole since 1912, and I don’t blame it. These seem to me to provide a charming and often helpful window into how a child sees himself. A girl who asks Santa Claus for “a pony and a farm” probably cares little for pop culture; a boy who yearns for “an iPod and a Wii” presumably doesn’t long for hockey skates.
“What do you want for Christmas?”
There’s a straightforward solution to this annual difficulty: Don’t ask, and don’t tell.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
