gift giving notes from the archive.
for your reading pleasure.
As many of us stateside are packing bags or waiting in train station lines or otherwise elbow deep in stuffing prep, here’s a bit of reading for a very consumerist holiday weekend. These are posts I’ve written in the past that remain evergreen as we navigate a time of year that’s as ripe with generosity and care as it is rife with consumerist consternation.
Gift Guiding
My personal approach for boldly proclaiming your weirdest wishes, welcoming friends and family members into the fold of your wackiest plans, and generally navigating a consumer season that wants to thwart those wishes at every turn.
Asking for less in a culture that values more is out of the ordinary. Breaking from the mold that would have holiday celebrations look like the stuff of television commercials and Hallmark Christmas movies goes against nearly every cultural trope we’re bombarded with during the holiday season. Suggesting that kids might not need piles of toys under a tree runs counter to what toy manufacturers, storytellers, and songwriters have been telling us for more than a century. Who are you, anyway? Scrooge?
Taking Inventory
Thoughts on helping kids to develop a habit of tidying up and taking inventory of their stuff—helpful always, but most especially before the holidays.
More than aiming for a perfectly tidy space, the goal in establishing this regular clean-up and accounting of belongings is to invite kids to have some control over their own stuff. For kids like mine, living with considerable privilege in a country consuming an entirely disproportionate number of toys, stuff is, frankly, foisted upon them at alarming rate. In a given week, even with nary a holiday in sight, I’m astounded by the sheer volume of items that filter into our apartment via my kids. During the holidays, the number of items quadruples. Sure, many of these things are small and insignificant—the stuff of party bags and schoolyard trades—but each of them still requires financial and planetary resources to produce, most of them are exceedingly hard to responsibly dispose of, and all of it needs somewhere to go.
Treats, Trinkets, and Treasures
Speaking of inventories, here’s a screed against the small plastic and otherwise junk that children are bombarded with at the holidays and always. So, what can we do instead? I humbly submit a few ideas.
In considering what my own child might contribute to the long socks, I was struck by both my grumpiness and my engrossment. Why did I care so much? Devoting any energy at all to a string of socks hanging in an elementary school classroom is surely not the best use of my limited reserves, but I am fascinated by the obsession with and practice of trinket giving to young kids. There’s the sheer volume and the normalization of wastefulness to consider, but also, and maybe more meaningfully, there’s the continuous reinforcement of the idea that we show our love, our appreciation, and our friendship through stuff.
My Kids’ Most-Used Toys
A kid-generated list of the most favorite toys in our household, with plenty of annotation by yours truly.
Notably, what is most used is not always the same as what’s claimed to be most loved. Silas’s immediate response when I interviewed my kids around the dinner table for this piece was to declare the aforementioned plastic spaceship at the foot of his bed his most used toy. It’s objectively only rarely played with, but no doubt his current fond feelings for it are real. Calder told me that “squishy things” were her favorite toy. Squishy things is Calder-speak for the fruit leather I sometimes cave and buy her from the bodega on the way home from school. We can chalk it up to her minimalist preference for comestible gifts, but really it’s a reminder that the littlest kids are happy with and game for just about anything. What they receive and to some extent what they end up valuing, is up to the grown-ups.
