Maybe as adults who've been exposed to ever-cheaper consumerism we're becoming less discerning about value beyond the price.
The idea had been taking shape for a number of years but an incident a few years ago brought it instantly into sharp focus. That incident involved me, my wife and the five gifts I'd bought for her birthday.
It occurred on my wife's birthday, and the fact that the date was about a month after Christmas is particularly relevant. I'd excelled myself that Christmas, coming up with innovative and significant gifts for my wife, and I was still basking in a golden glow as I searched desperately for gift ideas for her birthday.
A few days before her birthday I formed the opinion that in view of my recent Christmas glory a few smaller gifts would be enough to hit the spot that year, and so I bought a bag of Darrell Lea's soft liquorice, her favourite, a gadget to make it easier to unscrew jar lids, which at the time was cutting edge, a new type of garlic crusher she now treasures, and two other gifts I can't remember and I dare not ask her to remind me.
Her sense of anticipation had seen the glow grow even more golden over the preceding month, so golden that I felt wrapping was unnecessary, but when I delivered the gifts to her on birthday morning the glow came to a shocking end.
What happened can be described most gently as her lobbing each of the five gifts in my general direction, and I realised in a flash that I should choose gifts that were either too light to hurt or too heavy to hurl.
The underlying problem is that her birthday is too close to the gift frenzy that is Christmas, and in just a few years that has become a bigger problem for the Corbett family. Three of our four grandchildren have birthdays within three weeks of Christmas, a son in law's big day is 25 days after Christmas, and as you know my wife is in that mix.
So to my idea. I'm proposing to relocate the birthday of Corbett family members who were born regrettably close to Christmas, and as I explain occasionally to groans and rolling eyes everyone will be a winner. Of course we can't change a birth date but we can change the date of celebration and thus gift giving.
Somewhere mid year, and to avoid the all-too-frequent difficulty of a birthday falling on a busy week night we'll set the celebrations for, say, the first Saturday of July each year. I use the plural we, by the way, to promote inclusivity.
Those whose birthday shindig has been relocated should get a peck on the cheek on their birth date and the full service five or six months later. And lest our youngest grandchild and possibly subsequent grandchildren feel left out of this July jubilee we'll make it the all-inclusive Corbett family birthday party, much like the horses' birthday of August 1.
I like it.
What I don't like is the deluge of gifts for children at Christmas, although my solution to what is always a storm of plastic junk is even less likely to get up than my Corbett family birthday.
You've seen it, the maelstrom of wrapping paper as children work their way through a pile of discount-store garbage in a frenzied half hour on Christmas morning, and it's a glut that seems to be more excessive each decade. Sure, among the gifts are things that have an intrinsic value, that have been carefully chosen by loving family members, but they are just part of the storm. It may even be that the colourful plastic toy that won't survive the week has more appeal on that day to the child.
Has this excess, I wonder sometimes, come about because we're affluent? Most of us can afford more in recent years and because things have become much cheaper since China cornered the market for everything we can assemble even bigger piles on Christmas eve.
But I've read and I've seen that the less affluent among us build the biggest pile of junk, so I don't know. Maybe as adults who've been exposed to ever-cheaper consumerism we're becoming less discerning about value beyond the price.
Now, my solution is borrowed from friends who have developed it for their own three small children. They allow only two gifts per child, one from them and one from a grandparent, and you can see that the purpose of this limit is to build a sense of value and appreciation in their children.
Also on the positive side are issues of waste and pollution and thoughtless consumerism. A study commissioned by the bank ING last year found that $400 million was spent in Australia on unwanted Christmas gifts in Christmas 2018 and that many of these gifts went into the bin. There's also the wasted resources in manufacturing and transporting these unwanted gifts, the wrapping and packaging, much of it plastic.
The two gifts for each of my friends' children are significant, something that the child is going to enjoy for a long time, and as, say, a grandparent you'd put a good deal more thought into buying a gift if you knew it was just one of two, if you knew it was not going to be diminished by a pile of colourful plastic garbage.
Still, it does seem severe, the two-gift limit, and I'd prefer asking each of the usual donors to give just one gift per child.
I can remember only one Christmas gift from my childhood, a blue crystal radio set that I used for many years, and I suspect that my friends' three children will remember each of their Christmas gifts for decades.
But as I wrote, this solution is the least likely of the two to get legs in the Corbett family.
jeffcorb@gmail.com
letters@theherald.com.au
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