Socks? Oh, you shouldn’t have
Jillian Venters will never forget the “amazingly clueless” past boyfriends, who, each Christmas, would lavish her with girlish trinkets and pretty clothes. Hadn’t she told them how as a 6-year-old she had dreamed of being the Wicked Witch of the West when she grew up?
Not that she’s bitter. “I realized quickly,” she says, “that I had to find a graceful way to say, ‘Uh, this is a very cute, uh, sterling silver heart, but haven’t you noticed the bat motif on all my other jewelry?’ ” Today, as the online columnist Gothic Miss Manners, Venters, 34, devotes space each holiday season to the all-too-common problem of gift disappointment among Goths.
Actually, it’s an all-too-common problem among non-Goths, too, as it turns out. Once the dirty little secret of the holiday season, that sinking feeling that says, “You shouldn’t have -- no, I mean really!” now appears to be everywhere. It’s the new fruitcake (not to mention the old fruitcake).
Fueled by technology and a confessional culture, disappointment has become seasonal Topic A from news outlets to academic papers to Web logs to, in the case of Venters’ column, horror-fiction ‘zines read by people with lots of eyeliner.
This year, recognition of gift disappointment as a force to be dealt with has included a move by a majority of shoppers toward gift certificates. Meanwhile, personal expressions of dissatisfaction have become a seasonal standby.
“Two years ago I got this musical jewelry box from my mom. I’m a 22-year-old male. Also, I never wear any sort of jewelry,” moaned NickLess on a forum sponsored by the Seattle-based somethingawful.com Web site.
“Three packages of freaking socks,” read a posting on the San Diego-based funny-funny-pictures.com humor Web site. “No wonder I divorced him, huh!?”
But gift disappointment isn’t just about wildly inappropriate or cheap gifts. More commonly, the gifts that fail to please are completely reasonable presents -- for someone else.
A lovely sweater for a woman who prefers jackets is not going to elicit a heartfelt thank-you. Top-of-the-line fishing gear for the man who spends all his free time on the basketball court is a similar letdown.
Until a little more than a year ago, Tim Koltek ran a Web site that specialized in outing such perpetrators of gift disappointment. Although the site is no longer up, “at its peak, it was getting thousands of hits and had an online newsletter with a circulation of 11,000,” says Koltek, 28, who now is the CEO of a Silicon Valley wireless software company. “I was doing 10, 12 interviews a day around the holidays.”
The interest in gift disappointment, like the reign of the Furby, is in some ways a cipher. After all, off-the-mark gifts have been around as long as there have been holidays. (Hard to imagine that the baby at that first Christmas cried, “Yay! Myrrh!”)
But people who study the subject -- and people now do, in fact, study gift disappointment -- point out that gift givers are only human.
Research at the University of Utah, for instance, indicates that in most gift exchanges, good or bad, the giver’s self-image matters more than the recipient’s self-image -- in other words, a lot of gifts are given in the spirit of pleasing the giver, so it is often pure luck that the recipient likes them.
In another study, Cele Otnes, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Illinois, found that not all gifts are pleasing because not all givers are created equal.
“Some people are ‘socializers’ who give to impart values that are important to them,” she said. “Some people are ‘providers’ who insist on giving things like socks and underwear that they think you ‘need.’ Some people are ‘acknowledgers’ whose intent is just to recognize people such as teachers and secretaries in their social network, so they buy something just to buy something.”
Then again, some people are just hard to buy for, a fact now recognized by two surveys. Last month, American Express and America’s Research Group, a marketing organization, found that the number of consumers who plan to play it safe with gift certificates instead of presents is at an all-time high; in both surveys, the figure topped 50%.
The good news, says Otnes, is that bad gifts don’t damage good friendships. “It isn’t the thought that counts,” she says, “it’s the relationship.”
That said, in the event of gift disappointment, etiquette experts suggest a simple, fake-smiled “thank you” (as opposed to another oft-suggested response, “Gosh, I sure hope this never catches fire, really”).
Above all, Venters says, if your well-meaning aunt gives you a fuzzy yellow sweater instead of that festive cheek-piercing you’d hoped for, remember “rule one: Don’t throw a fit.”
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One in a series of holiday essays.
