“Would anyone in your family like this, maybe one of the children?” a friend of mine asked. She held out a pretty cardboard box, the kind that suggests that something expensive waits within. “Maybe,” I said, thinking hopefully: Maybe whatever it is will fit me!
“They’re a lovely couple, I’ve known them all my life, and they always send me a gift at Christmas, and I feel terrible not wanting to keep it, but — well, you’ll see.”
I opened the box, rustled through its expensive-looking tissue paper, and drew out a fringed, semi-beaded length of puzzlement. It was made of gray shaggy yarn and leather strips braided together, with dangly bits at each end. It was a belt, an apparently expensive belt that looked like a combination of tribal fetish and children’s art project, like the horrible stringy muck that someone has pulled out of a shower drain, like something the cat has dragged in.
“Wow,” I said, holding it away from myself. It was repellent.
“I know,” my friend said, with a wince. “I had the same reaction. I can’t imagine ever wearing it, and it breaks my heart to think that they went to the trouble of buying it for me. They must have thought I’d like it.”
“Not only that, but someone made it, thinking someone else would like it,” I marveled. “And a store stocked it, thinking someone would buy it. And someone did!”
“And it’s hideous!” cried my friend.
Oh, how fraught the business of giving and receiving gifts can be. My poor friend was wracked with guilt. She adored the people who had sent her the belt. She didn’t want to be, or seem, ungrateful. It touched her that they made such a kind effort every year, that they always wanted to hear news of her family from her parents, and had generally been lovely to her since she was a girl.
Yet here was this horrible object, invisibly freighted with sentimental obligation. Throwing it away seemed unthinkable. Regifting would be impossible, for reasons both emotional and practical. Putting it into a donation box for charity seemed doubly crass: If the belt was as awful as we both thought it was, why would anyone with fewer material resources think any differently?
We stood for a moment in silence, regarding the object.
“Do you think the children could use it for dressing up?” my friend asked, finally. “I’d feel better about giving it away if I knew it was going to a good home.”
I considered this. I imagined coming across it, while I was tidying bedrooms.
“I hate to say no,” I said slowly. “And I don’t want to add to your distress, but I really don’t want that thing in the dress-up pile. It’s kind of creepy, to be honest.”
She sighed. She understood.
“I guess I’ll put it in the basement,” she said returning the belt to its box. “And then I’ll write an extra nice thank-you note.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
