The art of giving presents and the unknown struggle it brings with itself

While giving/receiving a present feels awesome in your childhood, later on in life it causes gigantic ripples on hell’s lake. I can still remember the excitement that I felt just by thinking about the awesome gifts bought through the sweat and hardships of my parents.

And in the end who gets credit for it? Well in some countries it’s Santa and in others Jesus who’s birthday we celebrate by relentlessly mowing down innocent Christmas trees.

Gifting kids is awesome but gifting adults starts a vicious cycle that follows Murphy’s law “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

Trust me I’ve been around the block enough times to know, we all get that one gift that we wanna pack right away and throw it swiftly into the next dimensional wormhole not to be seen again.

Especially if you are minimalist and your don’t wanna lift 20 items just to be able to wipe the dust off your furniture.

If you feel the same way I’m curious what your top 3 worst gifts are/were.

My top unwanted gifts are as follows

From crappy to crappier:

-candle holder,scented candle – I have electricity in the house,and unfortunately I can’t see shit in candle light, it’s a freaking fire hazard waiting to happen. I guess it’s time to play a game of Marco polo.

(Disclaimer : It’s not easy to express sarcasm in writing).

-Clothing – I could go through the whole town and not find anything that I would like (or it’s too expensive and I don’t wanna sell a kidney) and you have the audacity to think that you can guess the sophistication of my tastes ? Hell sometimes even I don’t know what I want and I’m just floating around the shop like a silently released fart.

Oh yeah and if it doesn’t fit *ding ding ding*,you won a ride to the furthest shop in town . For me it’s extra crappy because I get anxiety just thinking of giving stuff back, sometimes I even feel bad for telling the cashier that I got the wrong change.

-Photo-frames – having lots of pictures of myself gives me a feeling of an egocentric narcissist.

-Chocolate Boxes – every time I open these, I somehow always miss the expiration date.

Now that I think about it I could be receiving other people’s hand me down chocolates or I open them pretty late. Most of the time I just take them to work and let the locust swarm(co-workers) take care of things. 

Since I gain weight just by smelling the air in the vicinity of food, I really need to be careful with my sloth speed metabolism.

Starting the souvenir cycle

Whatever you do, do not start this because it will force you  to bend over with cheeks spread apart to merchants who can hardly wait to penetrate you and your wallet. Because in most places the souvenirs are pricey.

And if you started the fridge magnet scavenger hunt you will probably feel like crap if your friend travels 3 times a year while you only go once.

My advice to you is : instead of souvenirs just invite your friends over for some drinks and home made food and share some fun stories.

Let’s be real, for the gifting thing to work one must always gift the other one with a similar sentimental\material value object. I feel the most frustration when one person puts a lot of time and effort in a handmade gift and in exchange buys a simple item from the store next door.

And if one of you guys raises the stakes the other one will have to keep up and it could lead to some serious “making it rain” in the shop situations.

My personal experience

Real life scenario: my wife’s work colleague just bought her an expensive bottle of Champagne that cost like 50 EU. Now of course since we aren’t shitty friends we will buy her something back in about the same approximate value. But after this the circle will continue in a spree of unwanted spending. The problem here is that I moved from a poor country to Germany 5 years ago,and I was used to getting a 200 EU salary.

It took me quite some time to get used to these new standards of living.

Even now I laugh when I think back at the time I bought myself that Frappe for 3 EU,I mean it’s just milk and some coffee powder, meanwhile I can buy half of a littler milk for 1 EU.

Every item that I bought was calculated in work hours at the worst job I ever had, so you can imagine the shivers running up and down my spine while checking the prices.

I know that this gifting “thingy” keeps the economy going but it just fills up our home with plenty of unwanted crap. The only healthy way to gift is by limiting it to a small symbolical amount or if you must gift, just don’t expect anything back,a true selfless way of expression that is in absolute symbiosis of one’s values.