What are the best Christmas presents you have received in the past few years?
What are some things you always wanted but never received?
I always wanted a gift card for the Las Américas bookstore in Montreal or an amazon.es gift card but people probably think gift cards are soulless gifts and don’t like to give them.
“people probably think gift cards are soulless gifts”
In traditional US (roughly white middle class) etiquette it’s considered kind of… crude to let people know exactly how much you’ve spent on a gift (and would assume the same for anglophone Canada). So gift certificates aren’t great gfits (except maybe as part of a gift bundle where the total price of the bundle isn’t clear).
If the people giving you gifts are mostly from the former USSR though there might be other things going on.
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“What are the best Christmas presents you have received in the past few years?”
Clarissa, you asked this same question last year in your lead December 15, 2918 post. My 2018 comment from that date is still true a year later, so here it is again:
DREIDEL POST Dec 15, 2018 at 22:12:
“After years of getting worthless gifts (tie clips, cuff links, etc.) from various relatives scattered over the country, I finally got them all trained to send me what I really wanted every Christmas: FOOD! (It wasn’t that hard — I just kept sending them food packages no matter what they sent me, and they eventually got the idea.)
They’re mostly all dead now. The few young ones back east know that if they don’t remember to send me food every Christmas, I’ll make my cat the main beneficiary in my will.
Thumbs up: 6 Thumbs down 0.”
DREIDEL POST update Nov 16 at 11:42 AZ time:
Good taste is timeless, so I have no plans to change my annual giving routine — or to retrain my relatives to stop sending the delicious food that they’ve learned to send every holiday like clockwork. If any of them are stupid enough to go vegan, I’ll accommodate them with my gifts heading east, as long as they don’t try to return the favor.
Since this is your first Christmas post of the year: MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
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Have you ever asked specifically for those gift cards? I’ve gotten a few in the past few years, simply because I read so much that nobody ever knows what to get me. :p
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I would love a gift card. I have no birthday or holiday spirit, and I am very picky gift receiver: I dislike most presents given to me (even my poor husband, who’s probably as in tune with what I want as any human, only gets me what I want about 1/4 of the time), so I’d love love free money to get myself what I want.
I give Amazon gift cards to people who are not close (staff in my department; my kid’s elementary school teacher, etc.)
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As a matter of fact, gift cards ARE soulless gifts, and I never enjoy either receiving them nor would I ever consider giving one to someone.
If and when I have the means to give someone anything it will always be in the form of either cash or money order. The other person knows better what it is they want and/or need.
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What about the gift of Clarity as a Christmas present?! I wrote an article on my website titled “The Gift of Clarity” – https://authorjoannereed.net/gift-of-clarity/ – Feel free to check it out!
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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