A Guide to Gift Giving

By Peter Kadel

ATTENTION! ATTENTION! The holiday season is here, and if you’re not a crazy person living in the desert then winter is in full swing, which means it’s the time to celebrate the things that really matter like religious holidays, the appropriation of religious holidays, commercialization of religious holidays, and arguments over coffee cups that support religious holidays. But, it’s important to remember not to use any religion-specific greetings because winter isn’t about religion. Winter is about buying stuff for people and telling them weeks in advance (as in “Oh, I bought you a Christmas gift”) to guilt them into getting you something. Winter is about just letting yourself go into hibernation, emerging only to have awkward encounters with your extended family. Winter is about forgetting all of your healthy life choices and subsequently collapsing into a pit of guilt, cookie crumbs, and despair–once swimsuit season hits. However, the most important part of the winter holiday is gift giving, or more accurately, gift receiving. But as the old adage goes, “Nothing in life is free.” So, you’ll have to give gifts so people feel obligated to give you gifts. Luckily, there are several holidays in the coming days for you to use as an excuse to give gifts.

Hanukkah is the longest and is relatively well known, but it ended yesterday, so there isn’t any time to get your gift and then receive a gift from the recipient, and so your best bet is to just convert to Christianity and participate in Christmas because most of us don’t know when Kwanzaa is (unless you read Harlow Berny’s post last week) or what it’s about. After your baptism, it’s time to go buy gifts for your unsuspecting “friends.” In this process, it is important to remember that the purpose of giving these gifts is to encourage your “friends” to give you gifts, so you need to find a balance between cheap and meaningful. Some examples of cheap and meaningful gifts are decorative shot glasses, stickers from other countries, fancy paper, and potatoes–because everyone loves potatoes. If you want to improve your chances of getting a good gift instead of a potato, –because who wants a lousy potato?–you should make sure the gifts have some kind of personal connection to the intended recipients. For example, if your “friend” likes the color red, give them a jar of blood, and if you want to make the gift really personal, make sure it’s their blood-type! If none of these examples are effective in guilting your “friends” into giving you stuff this holiday season, then you should recognize that you are in a “friendship” founded on manipulation and deceit, and you should end the “friendship” immediately.

Editor: AJ Patencio