June 28, 2010

It's dad, grad, bride, birthday and baby time, and that means there's not a weekend left through the summer that hasn't already been booked up with at least one - and often two or three - mini-celebrations of life. And for the most part, we love it. We're looking forward to the family, friends, food, drink and good times wrapped around all these rites of passage for all these people we love. So, what's the problem? Gifts.

It was easy back in the old days when most of the celebrants where young and innocent and all you had to do was grab a doll or a dinosaur, wrap it in some bright paper and hand it to a delighted child. But the internet has ruined all of that. These days, every celebrant has set up a web site or is registered with a dozen online stores, so that we well-wishers can let our fingers do the walking and our credit cards do the paying to pick, pay for, and send the perfect gift in less than 10 minutes.

We should be happy. We're not gifted gift-givers.

We're the folks who spent big bucks on an illustrated, three-language - Arabic, Persian and English - version of the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam as a wedding gift for our cousin who in her thank you card wrote, "the pictures are very nice." We're the ones who brought back from Brazil a hand-carved head that wards off evil spirits for a friend, whose wife dubbed it "monkey head" and tactfully gave it back to us. We have a whole list of gifts that we found delightful, even as the recipients gave us puzzled looks and mumbled hesitant thanks.

But, this internet shopping doesn't seem right. It's cold and commercial, and we're too warm and fuzzy to resort to such automated gift-giving. So, we're going to give gifts in the good, old-fashioned way.

We're going to sit down and start writing checks.

Until Next Time,
Carmela Cunningham