posted December 29, 2006 08:52 AM           

Innocuous and versatile enough to have an almost universal appeal, the gift card is here to stay. It's fast. It's easy.(It even eliminates the subtle twinge some of us feel when our gift is returned.)

Giving wasn't always this way you know.

Once upon a time, gifts were chosen with care; often made by hand. With few exceptions, the gifts given in that time expressed the esteem in which we held one another. This we expressed not in the cash value of the gift, but in the time taken from our lives to choose, find or craft it.

Another important consideration in that far off time (some 100 or less years ago), was that a gift reflect the recipient's tastes, personality and values. Once upon a time in our society, (if you'll forgive the flip-flopped cliche) to love someone..was to know them.

Perhaps we've come a long way since our simpler days with their simpler ways. Perhaps not as far as we'd like to think. Perhaps our industrial-corporate culture doesn't allow for the same familiarity and social contact that an earlier America did.

Perhaps our communication/technology obsessions have allowed us to spread our loved ones out so thinly, that we don't know them these days like we once might have.

Maybe the gift return lines got longer because the gifts got farther and farther off-target?

Could it be that we stopped giving the real gifts when we stopped putting our thought and time into the gifts we gave, and started thinking up ways to give up less and less of that time?

In the end, the moments of our lives are all we have to express how we feel about one another. Along come gift cards to save us even more time..maybe cheapen the gift a little. Money amounts to little more than coupons received in place of used up days that we gave to someone else: the company.
Only time and energy are of any value to the human soul...not scraps of government-issued paper.

If this season's reflections indicate anything at all, it's that we're an alienated lot. We're detached from our lives and our loved ones. Certainly more so than in days gone by.

Still, we haven't stopped giving, and in that there is hope and much to be thankful for.

This season comes but once a year folks, giving us the rest of the next to find a little time to get to know and love each other all over again.

Be good to one another. Happy holidays to you all.

Love,

posted December 29, 2006 11:39 PM         

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What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world is immortal"~

posted December 30, 2006 12:47 AM         

This year, because of my maternity leave ending just before December began, I lacked the funds to go all out on Christmas like I usually enjoy doing. The only people I bought for were my kids. My fiance and I didn't even buy gifts for one another.

We made gifts for everyone else. At first it felt kind of hokey, but in the end this was, no question, my best Christmas ever!

For the grandparents, along with a few other homemade gifts, I purchased some inexpensive journals at the dollar store and covered them with Christmas fabric to start Christmas journals. The plan is that every year around Thanksgiving I'll ask the grandkids to come up with some Christmas questions that we'll send to the g'rents, which they will then copy into the books and answer. Also they can put in photos, notes, etc.

I'm hoping this is something we can look forward to every year. I'm pretty excited, actually. The coolest thing is that if I wasn't low on cash, we never would have done this.