Giving Until It Hurts

Christine Seal loves Christmas and she loves buying gifts. Lots of them. By the time Dec. 25 arrives, her tree might be surrounded by a hundred presents. “A gift should say, ‘You know me really well,’ ” she says.

Take her cousin, for example. Now there’s a challenge. “He has no interests. He’s a lump. So I get him a subscription to TV Guide. Then there’s my mother who always says, ‘Don’t buy me anything. I have everything I need.’ So last year I got her a 10-pound bar of chocolate from Ghirardelli’s, and she was delighted because she didn’t expect it. For me, it’s that you’re sensing something unique about the other person, so when they open it up they say, ‘How did you know? This is perfect for me!’ ”

Christine does admit that gift-giving can be stressful. Before the season’s over, for instance, she’s even buying small presents for which she’ll later choose recipients. “Two days before Christmas, I feel like my head’s going to explode.” It almost does. She gets migraines.

Those headaches are only part of the reason Bernard Seal, Christine’s husband, likes Christmas at their Northridge home about as much as a colonoscopy. “This whole thing is designed to get the economy going, and it seems to get worse every year,” Bernard says. “When I see Chris doing this, I just want to scream. It’s supposed to be a holiday, but there’s no time to relax. Do we fight about it? No. We’ve been married a long time. I’ve given up.”

Bernard paused, then said, “One of the great things about Christine is she buys her own gifts and gives them to me to wrap, and then tries to forget what she gave herself so it’s a surprise.” Hearing that, I found it necessary to relate something Christine had told me. She said she hated the idea of telling someone what to get her because a real gift should involve the giver’s creative instincts.

Bernard said, “Oh dear.”

Whoever said that it’s better to give than to receive obviously didn’t live in a society where even gas station attendants chirp, “Are you ready for the holidays?” where Christmas decorations vie for shelf space with Halloween costumes, and “Jingle Bells” grows sinister with repetition. Or a world where, on average, every shopping mall in the land drew 8,758 visits to Santa Claus, according to Holiday Fun Facts 2003, compiled by the International Council of Shopping Centers. (The number might be higher if it were possible to find a parking space after 9 a.m.)

It’s a given these days that the health of the economy is measured not by how much people will spend on gifts, but how much more they will spend than the previous year. This year looks like a gusher, with the National Retail Federation predicting that spending will jump 5.7%, to more than $670 per shopper. This in a nation where the average per capita disposable personal income is $28,440, according to the Commerce Department.

“There’s a seasonal spike in bankruptcies related to the holidays,” says Los Angeles bankruptcy attorney Callaghan Brickwood, founder of Brickwood and Associates. “But it’s a little different than you might think. It happens 60 to 90 days afterward, which is when the credit card bills come due.”

A survey conducted by the American Bankers Assn. three years ago found that 40% of consumers will pay for holiday purchases with credit, and most take four months to pay it off. “It tends to be a last straw kind of thing for a lot of people,” says Jennifer Root of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Los Angeles, which helps people manage debt.

What’s bad for some consumers, however, is good for retailers. According to various estimates, many stores make more than half their annual income during the holiday season buying frenzy. Surely Wal-Mart is doing well. How else to explain that on Nov. 28, a 41-year-old woman was reputedly nearly trampled to death amid the sale of DVD players for $29 at the mega-chain’s Orange City, Fla., store. At least on first learning of the incident, Wal-Mart graciously announced it would hold one for her until she was well enough to claim it.

Nowhere is the frenzy more apparent than with children. “If you talk to people in their 80s and 90s, they’ll tell you they’d get an orange or something,” says child psychologist Dan Kindlon, author of “Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age.” “Now you hear stories all the time about kids getting so many presents they get tired of opening them. Or they end up playing with the wrapping paper and boxes anyway.”

It’s hardly a news flash that the holidays have become commercialized beyond the pale. But you have to wonder if it hasn’t reached critical mass when marketers are trying to embarrass you into buying their product--as is the case with the concept of “re-gifting,” which is turning up everywhere, like a bad credit rating. The coinage may have originated with an episode of “Seinfeld” a few years back, but no matter its origins, it has leached into popular culture.

If you are a troglodyte like me, you might not know that “re-gifting” is what happens when somebody gives you junk you don’t want and you dispose of it by giving it to someone else--preferably someone you don’t like. We all shudder at the thought, which is what the holiday marketers have figured out. “During this holiday season, give the gift they won’t regift,” reads a postcard I received in the mail the day before Thanksgiving. It was offering gift cards--the word “certificate” is apparently antiquated and woefully declasse--priced between $25 and $500. The offer was a little vague.

Personally, I’m fairly immune to this sort of coercion, since as a matter of principle I pretty much ignore the holidays. This is because I grew up in a family whose business owed about half its revenue to holiday gift giving. To us, the holidays meant lots of stress, cranky parents and long hours. Today, my holiday ritual involves calling my brother and my sister and telling them I didn’t buy them anything because I was too busy and I didn’t have any money, to which they gratefully respond, “Same here.” (My brother actually has a lot of money, but he likes to pretend that he doesn’t.) It’s as close as I’ve come to the gift that keeps on giving. I do try to make it a point to send my parents something, but fortunately, with the advent of grandchildren, they have more or less forgotten my existence. I do, however, look forward to that annual check from them for $25, a lump sum that includes my birthday present. I also have accumulated numerous cable-knit sweaters that might suit an Eastern European emigre circa 1981.

In this I am not alone, as I discovered on a recent afternoon when visiting my friend Alicia Hankes for coffee. When I brought up the subject of gift-giving, Alicia’s face clouded. She started opening cabinets and pulling out drawers, revealing a cache of gifts that were wide of the mark. Among them was a dream catcher. This I could relate to because over the years I have stashed about half a dozen of them, compliments of an ex-brother-in-law who fancies himself an artiste, in the dugout cellar of my parents’ home. Also in Alicia’s trove was a handblown wineglass, a hand-painted aboriginal boomerang, a woodcutting that spelled out the letters “Sauna,” which was some sort of inside joke for Alicia’s bathroom that she says barely made sense in its time, a wrought-iron candleholder that you might carry through the drafty corridors of a horror movie set, and a box full of what Alicia referred to as “little girl gifts,” which were mostly bright pink and fuzzy.

The coup de grace was an imitation hand iron with flowers embossed on the bottom. It was unclear to either of us whether its intended use was as a doorstop or to stamp floral impressions into your clothing. “Look at this! Does this really say ‘Alicia’? If it does, then frankly I’m worried.”

The problem with gift-giving, Alicia reckons, is that the recipients fall into two categories: “Those who have everything and aren’t capable of being pleased, and those who are so poor you couldn’t possibly give them anything that would make much of a difference.”

Of course, none of those factors apply to children, arguably the most important and oversupplied figures at the holidays. When I was a lad, a red two-wheeler was the most coveted of gifts. (Come to think of it, I had to save my allowance for about three years to acquire one, so scratch that.) In my early childhood, presents seemed tilted toward gladiator themes: bronze-colored plastic swords, boxing gloves, plastic Roman helmets. I guess they still are, though these days they come in electronic form--Game Boys and Play Stations. I honestly don’t know how parents navigate the whitewaters of materialism available to kids these days. This is partly the reason my far-flung niece and nephews never get anything from me, which may in turn explain why they don’t know who I am.

For perspective on Christmas and children, I spoke to child psychologist Robert Butterworth. As it happened, Butterworth had just been cleaning out the closet of his 18-year-old son, recently departed for college, and he was in a bit of a lather. “I took boxes and boxes to Goodwill. All those heroes of might and magic! We could have paid for my son’s first semester for what we spent on all that stuff, and we’re not extravagant parents.” From here, Butterworth unspooled what strikes me as a pretty much perfect deconstruction of Toys R Us, which someone else I spoke to calls a “crack den for kids.” I think I will just let him speak.

Doctor: “There’s definitely an escalation and it seems to be peer driven more than it was before. My wife is a teacher for L.A. Unified, and the playground is like a Middle Eastern bazaar. Now the big thing is cellphones, the ones that take pictures. Pagers and beepers! It used to be you had a bike and you survived. But nowadays it’s not like you can buy an old Game Boy. It seems like it’s hooked to their self-esteem--’You don’t have one?’

“Hand-me-downs used to be fine, but you can’t take a video game from an older brother because he had version .001 and now it’s version 10,000. Growing up, we had trucks and we had cars. Now all the toys are themed, tied to movies and television, so they’re almost immediately obsolete. So it’s not like you’re going to drag out an old action figure--Rambo? I don’t think so. Kids today wouldn’t even know who Rambo is.

“And it’s not just affluent people loading their kids up with stuff. My wife sees the kids of a lot of poor people, of immigrants, who don’t get a good breakfast but who have lots of expensive toys. I guess to keep the kids happy, the parents cave in. And most of the parents buying these expensive things don’t have an educational savings program.

“Another big difference is that when kids used to play in the dirt with toys, adults at least knew what they were doing, so they could play along with them. Now take someone like me, whose visual motor skills aren’t so good. I tried for a long time to keep up with the electronic stuff so I could play with my son, but finally I gave up. No wonder there’s a lack of respect toward adults. The mode of playing is so advanced that adults can’t keep up.

“You can’t blame the kids. They’re pressured. In order to fit in now, you have to have the newest whatever. And since more and more parents both have jobs, they make up for the guilt for not spending as much time with their kids with gifts.

“Overall, the holidays can be a process of desensitization. It’s like Chinese water torture. By New Year’s, people are saying, ‘Thank God it’s over.’ ”

I suppose it’s worth noting a lot of people didn’t want me quoting them by name on the subject of gift-giving. For example, while reporting this piece, I learned of a friend of a friend who planned to pull an all-nighter with a stack of catalogs and 800 numbers and put his misery behind him. I wanted to get in touch with him, but was told he didn’t want to be quoted because people might think he didn’t have the holiday spirit.

The day before Thanksgiving, I dropped in on the Toys R Us near my home to ask shoppers about buying gifts. Unfortunately, most people acted as if I were an agent of the devil. Then I came across two men checking out board games. I asked them if they were shopping for the holidays.

“No, we’re shopping for ourselves,” said the one in the red baseball cap.

“Basically, we’re selfish,” said his friend.

“We’re not really into giving a lot of gifts. But don’t quote us by name, OK?” said the first one, making a request that was easy to honor given that they hadn’t told me their names.

Nobody wants to be the Grinch, at least in print.

Ok, there’s something we need to get out of the way. Here, in a roasted chestnut shell, are the origins of modern gift-giving, derived from several books, including Stephen Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas,” published in 1996.

Christmas is, if truth be known, the cat in the hat dispatched to bestow legitimacy on the centuries-old European celebration of the winter solstice, when animals were slaughtered because meat didn’t spoil in cold weather. The custom of giving gifts is not, as is widely supposed, an echo of the gold, frankincense and myrrh brought as gifts to the baby Jesus by the three wise men. Rather, it dates from a time when the lords were pretty much obliged to let their vassals into the house to eat and drink to their heart’s content, and for one fine day to don the mantle of the ruler, else they trash the joint. It was a ritualized form of blowing off steam. As Benjamin Disraeli said, the castle isn’t safe if the cottage isn’t happy, and Christmas was the day when the workers were allowed into the manse to drink the lord’s mead and eat his meat, the one day when they didn’t have to bow. In a manner of speaking, Christmas gifts were more or less given at gunpoint, or at least, hoe-point.

Framed thusly, it is not terribly surprising that in the formative years of our land, before we shed theocracy for democracy, the celebration of Christmas was flat out against the law. Holding fast to the Puritan work ethic, between 1659 and 1681 employers penalized workers for failing to show up on Christmas Day. Class struggle, anyone?

Over time, however, the vestigial feudal customs of our European origins prevailed, and by the 19th century, Christmas had become an officially recognized holiday in America. As we moved from a farm and artisan economy into the industrial revolution, we began to abandon homemade products such as jam and bread in favor of manufactured products. It did not take long for ennui to set in.

Consider the following passage from an early story by Harriet Beecher Stowe called “Christmas; Or the Good Fairy,” written in 1850: “Oh, dear! Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything that can be thought of.” The character goes on to fret about the difficulty of, uh, gifting people who “have more than they know what to do with now; to add pictures, books, and gilding when the center tables are loaded with them now, and rings and jewels when they are a perfect drug . . . . There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”

Today we are a society just flat out clogged with stuff. Recordable DVD players, aromatherapy oils, Barbie of “Swan Lake,” Care Bears Bedtime Bear Lullaby Friend, chandelier earrings, MP3 players. We’ve got it all and we’re going to get more of it.

But how to go about selecting a gift when everybody you know has most everything they need? Carte blanche seems to be the answer. More and more, we’re giving those aforementioned gift cards--banish the unwieldy certificates--although they’re more often facsimiles of credit cards, the totems of consumer potency. Or, barring that, just plain cash. According to the National Retail Federation, gift cards purchases have exploded, with a recent poll showing that 48.4% of prospective recipients prefer them over a chosen gift. “Gift certificates used to be kept in a book behind the counter,” says NRF spokesman Scott Krugman, “but now they’re right at the checkout stand. They’re easier to hold onto. It’s the logical extension of a cashless society.”

There are alternatives. For one, you could hire a professional gift giver such as Shelly Balloon, who started out selling personalized message balloons, legally changed her last name to Balloon in 1984, and later carved out a fine career running interference for people who either don’t have the time or the inclination to shop for themselves. Balloon, broadly speaking, is in the business of stress relief, and not surprisingly, there is a good market for it.

So what should we do when buying presents for people who don’t need anything?

Balloon: Think dogs and cats. “Pet scarves are really big right now.”

Or maybe change your thinking altogether. Heifer Project International has found favor internationally by allowing donors to furnish impoverished families the world over with farm animals. The idea of sending a goat to, say, a needy Guatemalan family is easy to make light of as left-leaning Hollywood silliness, but this strikes me as quite a nice idea. “People really enjoy it,” says screenwriter Sally Nemeth, who herself has made donations through the organization. “It gives you a really good feeling because you’re giving something sustainable. I mean, enough candles already. I think people in the entertainment business have started to wake up to the fact that it’s kind of distasteful to give extravagant gifts to people who already have more money and possessions than they know what to do with. Charitable gifts are a really nice way to go.”

I suppose that the moral to this story, to the extent that there’s a moral to anything, is that if it’s not possible to avoid holiday burnout, then transcend it. “Being present is more enduring than giving presents, and that’s really what it’s all about,” says George Patterson, a marriage and family therapist at Glendale Memorial Hospital. Patterson is clinical director of the hospital’s alcohol and drug rehabilitation program. I called him because he gives an annual talk on coping with holiday stress, a time when many of us overdo an awful lot of things. “If we go to the true meaning of the holiday, this was to celebrate the birth of a special person. And it was quiet, so quiet that people noticed a bright star. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking, ‘Oh, Christmas is such a rat race, I don’t want any part of it.’ But you can also say, ‘This is wonderful,’ and enjoy it.”

Caught up as I was in my own holiday frenzy, I realized that it was time to have a man of the cloth weigh in, so I called Bishop Charles Blake of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ. Blake attested to what he regards as “a lot of advertising-generated franticness,” but said that rather than rail against it, he prefers to steer people toward the message. “It’s not meant to be a time of pressure, but rather a time of joyous sharing,” he said. “At my church and most other churches, we try to focus on the true meaning.”

Then I asked Blake how he handled the gift-giving dilemma. He laughed. “Oh, I just throw up my hands, give them some cash and let my family get what they want.”