Ungrateful little wretch! Furious, I rang my mother. To report my son didn't like the shorts I had bought him. Wrong colour, apparently. Too crinkly, supposedly. I sought her sympathy. What did you expect, darling, she said, it's in his DNA. And proceeded to remind me of every present I had ever rejected. Of the Christmas I was 15 and sobbed over some black and white stripy knee socks. They were what I'd asked for, what I'd desperately wanted, but when my mother hadn't been able to find any in the shops she'd made me a pair. And when I'd breathlessly opened them, they'd looked not so much, as envisioned, like something 80s girl band Bananarama would have worn, but rather, with their pointy feet and seamed legs, tailor-made for one of Santa's elves. Oh God, I said, almost 30 years later, and suffused with shame, I'm so sorry. That's all right, she said. It's probably karma. And she told me another story, of the dark blue, ribbed, fisherman's jersey she'd so coveted, Christmas 1969, and how when her mother had presented her with a navy, bri-nylon cardie instead, she'd wept. She described the precise awfulness of the buttons to me, and her voice still clanged with the disappointment of it.
My son isn't greedy. He never asks for more than he knows we can afford. But twice a year he makes two carefully curated lists. The research is impeccable; his lists are comprehensive and ever so finely honed. I asked him once, not a little pissily, how he was capable of devoting as much time and care as he did to these wish lists, when he couldn't to his schoolwork? Well, he said, the way I see it is you only get two opportunities a year, your birthday and Christmas, to ask for what you want, so you need to be sure. As a parent you dream of your child's delighted squeals on unwrapping the contents of their stocking, not faces full of woe, and so I have resigned myself to no more surprises.
The thing is, I get it. I like to think I have grown more gracious when it comes to receiving gifts, but I am still impossible to shop for. Perhaps it's because, like my son and mother, I love shopping and always know exactly what I want. It doesn't matter whether it's a punnet of strawberries I'm after, or a pair of stilettoes; I love the effort of the initial search, the pleasure of the eventual purchase. I wish I didn't. I vote Green for goodness sake; I know how unsound such blatant consumerism is when the Earth's future hangs by a thread. I know how painfully wrong it is that while there'll be many presents around the tree come Christmas morning with my children's names on them, there'll be many children with none.
I read about families who have ditched Christmas shopping altogether, exchanging small homemade gifts, and while I admire them, I have no desire to follow suit. Oh I do what I can; recycling wrapping paper, rejecting excessive packaging, refusing to buy novelty gifts, so useless and ultimately wasteful. And where at other times of year I can be less generous, during December I donate to every charity who asks for my money. I discuss what it is to be thankful with my children. Rather than just dropping their City Mission gifts and food in the box for those less fortunate, I have them actually go into the Mission, to make real the poverty upon our doorstep. I do this and I know it's nowhere near enough. That ultimately I am merely assuaging my own guilt. And I think about how I both love Christmas and yet how fraught it is. How bloody wretched!
Following on
