For me, Christmas is, like Mother's Day and Hanukkah, mostly a holiday celebrated by other people. I don't particularly belong anywhere. If I have a girlfriend, I spend it with her. Failing that, I'd rather be alone. Sure, I could fly home and spend it fending off the various viscousnesses hurled by my family. Next. I could spend it with any number of friends. Their invitations are warmly welcome, and it's lovely to be remembered. But I also know going would just make me feel tacked on to someone else's holiday. Nah.
That isn't to say that I don't participate. I enjoy baking kolachi, as well as buying and receiving gifts. Allie tells me I'm impossible to buy for. "Anything you want, you already have," she grumbles disapprovingly, sometimes wondering aloud why other people are off the hook when it comes to exchanging gifts with me. Yet she always comes through with gifts I never knew I wanted. This person knows me and cares enough to wrack her modest brain until she imagines up something that will delight me. The most touching gift of all, that.
The opposite of touching? Getting crap. Token gifts. When one friend started dating a guy who had a small child, I gave her an elaborately equipped picnic basket, the idea being, of course, either romantic or family excursions. And what did she give me? A Rubik's Cube. My interest in Rubik's Cubes waned around 1985, although I admit to a more recent fascination: what on earth made her look at this in a dollar store and think of me? I gotta say...I'm still interested.
The all-time such statement was made by the Approval Whore. It was at Christmas, in fact, when I decided the relationship was over. For months I'd heard my girlfriend obsess over getting just the perfect gifts for her mother and new friend. I'd listened. I'd advised. I'd helped. And when Christmas Day came around, she conferred on me a bunch of crap she's scooped up the day before at Tuesday Morning, a local thrift store. I remember bath towels that felt like burlap. And an ugly wooden ship that she'd hastily repaired. The contrast with her intense planning for others was striking. None of these monuments to how little she cared about me survived to see the new year. She did not notice.
Better to get a card than such a monument, don't you think?