If you’re anything like I am, then you’ve had that moment. It’s usually in the couple of days before somebody’s birthday, where you spend nearly every free second you have running through increasingly dubious gift ideas for the ‘lucky’ recipient. It also usually ends poorly, avoiding eye contact as you hand your famously tea-guzzling classmate a set of six stoneware espresso mugs before trying to pass it off as a joke. The pity-laughs hurt more than silence, really.
My biggest issue with birthdays (and other traditional gifting days) is not that I leave sorting them out until the very last moment and panic-buy the wrong kind of caffeinated drink containers. It is, however, linked to that problem – the pressure of having to produce a gift for a set date gets to me and makes me want to either obsess over every little detail (to no great improvement) or just forget about it and keep my sanity. After all, if somebody’s had to wait a whole year for their birthday present, they’ll be wanting it to be relatively decent and thoughtful, right? When it’s meant to be a joyous time of showing gratitude, I could do without the stress to succeed that litters every other issue in life.
Personally, I’ve always been better at spontaneous gifts. Seeing something in a shop or online and connecting that item with somebody is more my style. I find it usually ends up being both more appropriate for the person in question and received more warmly when given. Of course, it’s harder to claim that such a gift is thoughtful when you thought about it for all of three seconds. Fortunately, most people are grateful regardless, particularly if the gift is as good for them as you conceived in that split-second staring at a book display in a shopping centre.
Thinking over all of this led me to ask why we even still bother to find gifts for special days. If the results of time-limited shopping are near-guaranteed to be both ill-fitting and coolly received even before comparison with their spontaneous equivalents, then what is the point? Naturally, there are many reasons holidays become so commercialised, yet staying on an individual level it can seem difficult to explain. Difficult, but not impossible.
I thought it over and eventually I got somewhere. What fixed dates such as birthdays provide is a nice sense of stability, predictability even, which for many people takes away some of the mystery of relationships – whilst people are expecting presents on their birthday, they won’t be expecting them at many other times, and so there’s no need to go gift-hunting at those times. Strangely, the exact reason decent spontaneous gifts are so successful is why they’re not the mainstream.
So, what should we be doing? Any general answer is going to be flawed, and the state of the specific relationship should be considered. Some people hate gifts, some love them. For me, I’ll probably be easing up on my (self-created) pressure to perform on birthdays and justifying it by keeping an eye out for good presents on my daily walkabouts. Here’s hoping I don’t develop a crippling pressure to perform every time I go outside now.