The Gift of Love

I’m at Barnes & Noble and I see a book on Philosophy that I know my mate Frank would love. I just know it. I grab it off the shelf and proceed to the cash register… only to stop half-way because I realize it’s December and he might take it to be an X-Mas gift. Any other time of the year, he’d have an extra book on his shelf, but now, because it’s X-Mas and we agreed not to get each other anything, his bookshelf is as lonesome as a gay cowboy’s wife.

X-Mas.

Bah humbug.

I love love. I love people. I love red, green, and white. I love trees. I love jolly, old fat men who break into children’s houses every year. I love presents.

I hate X-Mas.

It’s the presents, actually. It bothers me that people expect presents. It never used to bother me, but somewhere along the line (I’m thinking December 25th 2003) when I saw my little cousins ask when they could open their gifts, it occured to me: they didn’t deserve a damn thing.

Not an iota of a present. Nothing. They were bad children and deserved a lump of coal and a seasonal beating the likes of which Oliver Twist would recoil in terror from.

But they expected presents. They expected presents. We all expect presents. And we’re expected to give them. Well, bah humbug! to you, sir.

A present is special because it shows that someone thought of you and that they care about you. A present that is expected is not a present, so much as a concealed gift.

It’s a fraction of a shadow of an imitation of what a present should be.

I want my presents to mean something. I don’t want them to be semi-annual expressions of feelings that I may or may not have.

It is why I refuse to participate in this holiday. From this day forth, I shall only get gifts for people I care about and only when I think about them.

Also, I won’t wrap them.

Because I’m terrible at wrapping stuff and, frankly, it’s just embarrassing.

I’m at Barnes & Noble and I see a book on Philosophy that I know my mate Frank would love. I just know it. I grab it off the shelf and proceed to the cash register… only to stop half-way because I realize it’s December and he might take it to be an X-Mas gift.…