don_hoodventures

So here we are in late August, and the holiday season is creeping up on us. Every year, the retailers start the creeping a couple of weeks earlier. Wanna take bets on when we’ll see the first Christmas displays in our local big-box retailers? Do you think they’ll even wait until after Halloween?

After just a few sentences we have already digressed from our main point. But the 26^th Amendment specifically protects our right to vent whenever and about whatever.

Some of you on the younger side may not know who Emily Post is. Or is that “was”? We assume she must be dead by now—she’s been older than dirt since 1967. So if you are not familiar with Ms. Post, she ran a syndicated newspaper (what’s a newspaper?) column for years about social etiquette. Her advice was always very prim, proper, and formal. One might even say her advice had a stick up its ass. She had no patience with informality or bending the “correct” and time-honored rules of human interaction.

Getting back to why we started the blog talking about the holiday season. In 2017, are Ms. Post’s opinions about how to give and receive gifts still relevant? Giving gifts is one issue but often the subtleties of receiving gifts pose an even bigger challenge.

We’ll start with what Emmy would say (I’m sure she’d be horrified by this blasphemous nickname. But at least we didn’t say “Emmie” or “Emmi.”) She would say that if we receive a gift we don’t like we should demurely put on the most phony sincere smile we can muster and say to the gift giver, “Oh, what a lovely gift! Thank you very much!” And then go to a corner and privately sulk.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve come across what we’ll call alternative ways of handling a gift you find in poor taste or otherwise unsatisfactory. We talked to some folks on the streets and bars of Houston and came up with some examples of other methods, some successful, others disastrous. Here are a few examples:

One guy got a gift that he liked from his sister, but it wasn’t in the color of his choice, and he expressed this to his sister. Seems like it would have been easy for the sister to just exchange the item for a different color. But no. She became angry and vowed to never buy her brother another gift, ever. We here at the blog corporate offices think she should have been happy that at least she had chosen an acceptable item.

A guy at one of our favorite watering holes bought his fiancée’s father a rather expensive coffee-table book for cigar connoisseurs, which this gentleman happened to be. This guy’s future father-in-law, who lives in another state, professed that he liked the gift. But a few weeks later the young man found the book in the trunk of his fiancée’s car. Oh, the hypocrisy!

A general truth we discovered: if you are dishonest with the gift giver, and tell them you like a gift that you really hate, the giver will interpret that as feedback to give you more of the same disliked item for the rest of your life.

Another general truth: if you say you like something you really can’t stand, you are now in the awkward position of having to wear the item or have it prominently on display in your home. Can you get away with just wearing/displaying the item for a limited time? But how long is “limited”? Two weeks? Two months? Thinking you can just bring the item out of the closet when the gift giver is coming over to see you is too risky. They could drop in at any time. You have been warned. Once in a while you might luck out by discovering that the unwanted item has been recalled for safety reasons, like a phone that catches on fire. Not that something like that would ever happen, of course.

What if someone buys you, let’s say, a tie. You like the tie well enough but unfortunately it doesn’t match any shirts you own. You could go out and buy a shirt that does match the tie, but in the case of the middle-aged businessman we met at Starbucks, he just never wore the tie. That turned out to be a bad decision in terms of his marital bliss or sudden lack thereof.

Sometimes honesty really is the best route to take, especially if the gift-giver was in the ballpark with the item they gave you. But the giver can’t be too thin-skinned. Case in point: a young woman really wanted a laptop for her birthday and her boyfriend went out and bought her a nice one. But it didn’t have quite enough memory for the woman’s needs, and after some initial friction, the boyfriend willingly went and exchanged the laptop for the one his girl really wanted. Good move, buddy.

And now we come to the controversial subject of exchanging “wish lists.” It seems like a win-win situation because if you buy someone something from their list, how can they complain? But hold on a second. It’s not that simple. If someone gives my co-blogger or me a gift list, we’d probably pick a couple of items off the list. But what if the receiver expected they were going to get ALL the items or at least several of the items on their list? To us, this is a bit selfish, but yes, it does happen. The other problem with lists is that while it’s easy, it takes the element of originality and thoughtfulness away from the giver.

One general rule of thumb that most people we talked to seemed to agree on: the better you know someone, the easier it is to be honest with them, knowing that they truly do want you to have something you like. With your 88-year old great aunt Dorothy from Nebraska, who you see maybe once a year or so, you might be better off going the Emily Post route.

Another gift-receiving debacle we came across in our conversations:  A woman’s mom sent her a hideous set of placemats for the woman’s birthday. The woman found the placemats so repulsive that she never took the factory packaging off them, and threw them in the back of a drawer. Several years later, Mother’s Day was approaching and the woman realized she had waited too long to start looking for a gift for her mom. She began rummaging around her house, and lo and behold, she came across a very ugly set of placemats in the back of drawer. She was amazed that they looked brand new and were still in the original packaging! You can fill in the rest of the story for yourself. I believe the woman and her mom returned to being on speaking terms within a year or two.

 This blog entry cannot be complete without the story of the 8-year old boy who opened a Christmas gift from his grandmother, obviously intended for his little sister. To his dismay, as he removed the wrapping paper he began to see the cover of a Barbie Doll coloring book. “Oh, wow, Grandma, just what I always wanted…”

‘Tis the season… the season to be at the top of your game when receiving gifts.