Today I want to bitch about gift buying. I really love giving gifts. No, really I do. I go absolutely manic around the holidays, buying shit I can't afford for people I love. But I discovered years ago, that some people just make it difficult to buy gifts. People like my parents.
My dad is the sort of person who, if he wants something, he buys it. There's just not anything you can buy for him unless you luck out on a conversation about something he can't find. I once had a pair of cargo pants. Y'know, the kind where the legs zip off and they become cargo shorts? Well he liked them. When he saw mine he asked me where I got them because he had been looking for a pair like that. Bingo! Luck at last. I finally had something I knew my dad wanted and couldn't get for himself. Well, there was a reason he couldn't find them. For some reason the gods of fashion had deemed zip-off-leg cargo pants unavailable that season. You couldn't find the bloody things for love or money.
My mother is very similar in her buying habits. But she's a little easier: you can actually buy her popular crafty decorative thingies for the home. The trouble is, she doesn't need any more popular crafty decorative thingies for the home. She has shit-loads. She has at least three homes worth of popular crafty decorative thingies for the home. This crap lies in piles of overabundant clutter all over her house. There are rooms (that's real, whole rooms, dammit) dedicated to storing her popular crafty decorative thingies for the home. It's crazy. So the only thing you know you're sure to score a hit with buying her, you can't buy her and preserve your sanity.
Then there's my partner. For starters, he makes five times more money than the best-paying I ever had. So he's in that if he wants it he buys it camp. Then too, he's just the sort of happy-go-lucky kind of guy who's pretty satisfied with his lot in life. The kind of infuriating person who doesn't really need anything. In our four years together, four years of anniversaries, birthdays, Christmases, Valentines Days, Easters, house-warmings, Arbor Days, and any other gift-giving excuse you can think of, I have managed to buy him exactly one present he liked. One. And of course every thing he's ever gotten me has been wonderful (and sometimes frighteningly generous). You just can't stand up against that kind of gift giving. You are Scrooge by comparison. Even if you were to chop off your right arm to find the perfect gift.
What can you do?
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