Christmas gifts

Well it’s that time of year, dear readers – the tree is set up and hung with sparkling lights; the windows have little battery-powered candles which dispel the gloom of long Maine nights with their flickering orange glow; the stove is merrily churning out wood-stoked carbon-heavy warmth; and I’m starting to fret about whether I’ve actually checked off everyone on my Christmas gift list.

With an eight year old son, most of the gift fretting involves making sure the collective families give him enough to think “wow, 2020 was worth living through just to get a great Christmas!” and yet not so much as to think “wow, I’m a spoiled little twat who will always get whatever he wants”. It’s a fine line, given that this has been a lousy and very complicated year for a small boy, and given that all the family is in a mood both to give and to be gratified by the look on a small boy’s face when he opens the greatest Christmas gift ever! – which, of course, is never as good as you hope it will be. But on my side, I’m also trying to think of the gifts that I should give, not just to my son, but to everyone whom I love. And that’s a long list.

This idea of a gift that “should” be given came up recently when the Essence of Water partners read the classic cultural anthropology work titled The Gift, or more precisely, Essai sur le Don, by Marcel Mauss. Veronique pointed out that the English translation of the title is peculiar; “the gift” would more precisely map to the French word “le cadeau”, whereas Mauss’s title would more appropriately map to something like “the donation” or “the offering” – not a gift at all, but something done with some kind of intentionality of effect. Indeed, reading The Gift I had an uncomfortable sense that Mauss had missed the entire point of “gifting” until Vero made that translation point. I think Mauss was definitely onto something regarding the nature of intentional transfers – offerings with strings attached, as it were. He had little interesting to say about gifts, on the other hand. The whole book was more about bribes, or sacrifices, or offerings – it said nothing about gifts.

My favorite gifts – both to give and to receive – are those that come from nowhere. I love donating things and money to charities that I have no real connection to beyond a shared purpose. I give money every year to the animal shelter in the town I currently live in, for example. I think what they do is great, but while my dogs have all been adopted strays, I’ve never actually adopted them from the animal shelter – I’ve found them from local foster homes who post on the internet. But the animal shelters serve a good purpose, and we share a love of creatures, and it seems like a good thing to do. Similarly, whenever I move somewhere, I donate my now-unneeded furniture to the local Habitat for Humanity or equivalent. Selling it would be a pain, true, but also – why not give things you don’t need to people who do? Giving in this sense – blind charity, as it were – is not done out of any sense of a future return: indeed, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure I never will have any cause to avail myself of an animal shelter on whom I may dump an unwanted pet, or need to beg for a bed from a charity due to my inability to buy one for myself. I don’t want returns, even in an abstract sense: I just want to give. In fact I’d prefer not to have anything in return – giving is a means of giving up, on my part, which itself feels like a release and therefore is good in a Henry David Thoreau sort of way.

I don’t just give to charities in this way; I’ve sent gifts to individuals in this way before as well – case in point, I’ve sent more subscriptions to the New York Review of Books than I can count, to people who in many cases wouldn’t return my phone call today. And conversely, I’ve also found it harder and harder to give gifts to the people who mean most to me in my life – at least, I find it hard to gift on command, on a date certain like Christmas or a birthday. In their presence, it’s easy to want to give them all I have – and when randomly searching through a library, it’s easy to think of how many books I want to give them, or while in a museum how much beauty I would love to give them. But when faced the pressures of coming up with that right special thing, or gesture, or whatever, on that very specific date of December 25th, no earlier or later, or March 11 or April 20 or June 8, I freeze up.

This year it’s all a bit harder, what with Covid and all. On a certain level, I know what I want to give everyone – a first pass at the vaccine and a bottle of gin for a chaser – but I recognize that there’s nothing, really, that will make this year anything more than a writeoff for all of us. I don’t want any gifts, and after almost a full year of fear and loathing, I’m almost put off by the idea of gift giving entirely. If someone is hoping for a gift, aren’t they just being kind of selfish? If someone needs to give a gift – beyond the ability to say hello, to share a smile, to imagine a hug again – then aren’t they kind of missing the point? If they expect to receive one – and they are older than twelve, maybe thirteen at a stretch – then aren’t they really missing the point, in 2020 of all years?

Mauss’s notion of a “gift” was a mis-translation; he was talking about the idea of an offer, as in Don Corleone’s offer which cannot be refused. And I actually doubt that he believed in the notion of a true gift, given without expectations, give only out of love. A gift, in this season of giving, isn’t an object – and indeed the more we think in terms of objects, we miss the point of a gift, the kind of thing that can only be discovered, never offered. A gift – un cadeau – is really just love, always, occasionally objectified in the form of a token or a bottle or a meal. What I’m hoping for myself this year is to discover the love of my friends, my family, my dog, my neighbors, in new ways. What I’ll be giving is my love, no strings attached, not objectifications or token but nevertheless, truly a gift, pure and simple.

And yet… there may be some Legos for a certain young man. I also got a copy of Accidentally Wes Anderson, a book of photographs of buildings that aren’t from Wes Anderson films but really should be, for my ex-wife’s brother. But that was just serendipity: I found the book randomly while looking for Legos, and I knew the ex-wife’s brother needed to have it. He’ll realize that and not make too much of the whole Christmas connection, I think, because he does get the joke. He knows what a gift is.

Last year, in the midst of traveling across the country every two weeks and trying to raise a new dog and trying to settle into a new home, my ex-wife’s brother gave me a wallet. I needed a new wallet, and had no idea he might have known. He didn’t – he just saw the wallet advertised, thought it would be something I could use, and bought it for me. The fact that it was mid-December was kind of irrelevant; he just wanted to do something good.

That’s a gift. You know someone, or you know someone’s values and their needs, and you drop un cadeau into their hands.

I’m still loving the wallet, and I’m hoping he’ll love the book. For the rest of you, though, it’s love that I’m giving you – and with no expectation or hope of its return. From all of us at The Essence of Water, thanks for reading this year, and a very happy holiday season to you all.