Case in point #1: That hard rectangular package is not a book.
The people we spent Christmas with this year (distant relatives, most of whom we had not met before) all gave each other DVDs as gifts. Not a single book to be seen. Has the DVD become the new default present? Even we were given DVDs, which is weird since there is no way they could guess at what we would like, nor even know if we had a DVD player. I don't have anything against DVDs, but they would never even have crossed my mind as a Christmas gift option.
Case in point #2: Yes, we like our stone-age very much
A line from a Christmas letter from a family friend whose daughter (my age) has recently (finally!) moved out of home:
"M- has only had time off work since Friday, and since she is now the only woman in the household, it has been a little hectic for her with all the preparation for Christmas and baking and so on." (Note that her husband, the writer of the Christmas letter, is unemployed with plenty of time on his hands.)
Saturday, December 29, 2007
People do things differently. And it always shocks me.
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5 Comments:
wow, it's that sort of stuff that pisses me off about christmas letters.
On the DVDs... I do think it is a bit odd to give DVDs to someone you don't know well -- Hubby and I gave them as a family present to his sister-in-law, but we gave movies we knew the kids would love.... and they gave us 80s movies they knew we'd like as well.
On the "it is really busy for the working woman"... bit -- wow! The poor woman, to a) be expected to have the same sort of traditional Christmas as someone who doesn't work outside the home and b) watch her husband loaf on the couch and eat her cookies without helping... eek!
I'll take a DVD over a "yet another Bible" any day (a Bible is a default gift from Hubby's distant relatives; I think they get them in bulk). At least they stopped giving Hubby and I a copy each (how many of these do we really need??)
Don't even get me started on the "Case in point #2." Deep breaths...
Well, the nice thing about a DVD gift is that if it's totally uninteresting to you, it might make a nice birthday present for someone else down the line."Regifting" is very popular now.
My loved ones say I'm "hard to buy for". I need to find a tactful way to suggest they just get me gift cards. I know exactly what I like!
Sciencegirl: that's a good point. The DVDs are likely to be far more entertaining than my mother's idea of a good book: "The gift of contemplative prayer".
Talk to me! (You know you want to!)