‘Tis the season... - Mariana

‘Tis the season...

‘Tis the season to be jolly…and to inspect gifts for signs of re-gifting.  You see, at Christmas you may be forgiven a red cat suit over a size 26 figure complete with a plunge at the back betraying the glorious point of origin of the crevice in your nether regions and the matching red thong that’s desperately lodged therein; you will be forgiven for drinking too much and kissing Uncle Fred deeply enough to damage his tonsils...or for forgetting to visit Aunt Karmelina, even.  But re-gifting…well any social sin worthy of an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ is well-worth considering avoiding.

Most of us are born with the ability to catch the whiff of a re-gift a mile off. The obvious signs vary from broken corners and loose spines on books, broken tape and seals on all else and bits of the old wrapping paper still stuck with tape to the offending item.  

But it’s those doubtful ones that irk us most.  The gift which is a little, but very minutely, creased - enough for it to pass as ‘shop-soiled’. The gift which is so horrible we can't believe it can have started its life in the Giving Department between the giver and you and hasn’t in fact been passed round in cute wrapping paper for a few generations; the gift which is a tad more expensive than what you’d expect of the giver - Zija Karmelina, who knows you’re visiting her only because Mum threatened to ask her to come to Christmas dinner at your house if you didn’t, can’t possibly have given you this had she known what it was worth could she?  And yet, no matter how much you turn it over and round, there is no definite proof to settle the ‘re-gift or not’ issue. 

We hate these gifts: they leave us querying where we stand.  For, sometimes, gifts function to help us categorise our relationship with the giver more finely.   Take for instance a gift of an Adidas shower-pack. This clearly means, "I am socially obliged to give you something but don’t care enough to think about what to give you and I didn’t want to spend much anyway... so I bought something cheap, which you may just be mutton-headed enough not to be capable to come up with a pecuniary appreciation of," or, "I got this last Christmas and couldn’t think of anyone bland enough to give it to, except you".  

In either case Adidas shower packs are an insult disguised as a gift.  But you just cannot be sure what form of insult to categorise it under if the corners of the box are slightly suspicious: does it only mean, "I don’t care about you," or, "I don’t care about you and find you boring enough to be an apt receiver of my blandest re-gifts"?

Some gift-bearers have particularly dubious ‘backgrounds’ and we teachers are probably foremost amongst the array of usual suspects.  After all we yearly receive loads of chocolates, don’t we?  Not to mention the generous supply of Tal-Lira items, that we can’t possibly all donate to parish bazaars without even the Kapillan raising an eyebrow.  So if all this junk must go somewhere it is safe enough to believe that some are returned to the great chain of gifting: those lovely chocolates ta’-toghma-wahda-u-toghma-ta’-sapun, those ‘Mon Cheri’ chocolates less and less people seem to find edible each year, the seemingly never-ending supply of ‘Quality Street’ boxes.

For the innocent serial suspect, efforts to avoid suspicion can make one paranoid.  For how can one clear oneself of suspicion if the case against one is often a silent one?  I say ‘often’ because I have been arrested, in the middle of a Christmas dinner, by Aunt Karmelina, who beholding my gift of a box of Baci, very loudly thanked me with, "Nice Mariana, you know how I love these and you do well not to keep all the boxes the kids give you. They expire after some time".  

That was the day I realised that I was a suspect-by-profession and embarked on a mission to find ways of thwarting the re-gifter label.  

There’s not much you can do besides, of course, obsessively checking any gift you buy for possible, false clues to re-gifting like a microscopic dent in the box. However, I find it also wins you points to give the same gift to multiple people: all aunties get the same big box of chocolates, all kids get the same fuckin' game (because if you have kids your gifts to kids are also suspect, you know).  The other option is to give a home-made gift: a home-made Christmas log and home-made wine - except that means that you have to spend all of December 20th crushing damned Morning Coffee biscuits, not to mention digging a cellar and taking a course in wine-making.  The last option is to give very personal gifts: find something for their collection of Schwarovsky animals or friggin' glass bottles (except that if you’re internet literate you run the risk of being suspected you got it cheap off e-bay, but that’s another story), get them something for their pet, measure Aunt Karmelina’s tits to get her a monogrammed bra, even.

Not my Aunt Karmelina, mind you: if you must know, I give her the biggest box of ta'-toghma-wahda-u-toghma-ta'-sapun chocolates I receive each Christmas. She completely deserves the sentiment..... heqq, unless I have an Adidas shower pack, that is.