Gift Nag

Every year around this time, my mother asks for ideas for what to get us for Christmas. This isn't terribly surprising, since I've always been notoriously hard to buy gifts for. But the key word is "us." Ever since we got married, my family no longer thinks of us as separate people when Christmas rolls around.

There is some merit to this, but not always. Mostly that's because we've been together long enough now that we have pretty much everything we need, bit they keep buying us gifts that tend to fall into the category of "well-intentioned, but kind of useless," like most Yankee swap gifts. Things like an air ionizer, a stove-top grill that fits over the burners, and some sort of cheese set with a big wooden box with a drawer that had three tiny knives inside. When we moved last year, we got rid of all this stuff, either by giving it away or putting it on our moving-day trash pile.

Last year, we decided we needed to be proactive. I told my family we were planning to get a plasma TV, and they should forego gifts and just give us money, which we would put toward the purchase. It worked. I wanted to do the same thing again this year, except we don't have any major purchases planned. I thought about inventing one, just to keep the practice going and head off more unneeded gifts. It might be slightly deceptive, but isn't it better than getting something else we don't need and won't use?

My dad has the right idea though. He just gets us gift cards for stores like Target, because he knows we'll always use them.