Someone I know still bears a grudge against his sister because on the eve of his 10th birthday she told him what he was getting as a present from their parents. At a stroke this heartless person – OK, it was me – stole from him everything that was best about his birthday: a night of anticipation, the breakfast-time delirium of the unwrapping, and (this was what upset him most) his pleasure at making his parents pleased by being pleased himself. There’s more to the business of giving gifts than just giving.
All the same, it does seem to have become very much more complicated, or at least complicated on a different level. First it was reported that a parent sent out a bill to a family whose kid failed to show up for the party they’d been invited to. After all, someone has to pick up the tab from the dry ski slope. Now, at least if Myleene Klass’s Twitter account is to be taken at face value (which it might not be), it is acceptable in some circles to send out an appeal for cash rather than a present.
Fresh from trouncing Ed Miliband over the mansion tax and its unfairness to a multimillionaire celebrity singer, Klass is reported to have enraged the parents in her daughter’s class by tweeting an email from one mother saying her child wanted a Kindle for her birthday, and could they all chip in.
Actually, what the email said was nowhere near as offensive, but whatever the circumstances of the latest Klass spat, there are signs that there is a transactional element in the world of gift-giving these days that doesn’t feel quite right.
It is particularly marked in a certain kind of school culture, where new parents are quickly introduced to the tyranny of the party bag. In your memory, birthday parties may have been an event to which you took a present. Now you expect to bring one home as well. Several, in fact. And any parsimonious party organiser who, like me, experiments to see whether a small plastic bag containing a packet of Love Hearts and a 25p stripy eraser and matching pencil will do, soon discovers that it won’t, at all.
This brutal exposure to the modern culture of gift-giving left me resentfully trying to devise ways to undermine it, a project in which I entirely failed. The human instinct to value other people’s generosity, and therefore to be generous oneself, and the powerful urge to conform to social norms by appearing generous so as not to embarrass one’s children, was too strong for me. Condemning one’s little treasure to social ostracism by being the playground killjoy who banned presents or refused to hand out the party bag was too much. But it doesn’t stop me objecting to the undertow of corruption in the whole business of giving in public. The moment a present becomes not a simple act of goodwill but an obligation that is fulfilled in front of witnesses, its delights are subverted.
In fact, a present that is not given purely for the joy of giving it stops being a present at all. It becomes some kind of exchange that is made either in anticipation or fulfilment of a reciprocal deal. It’s a bit like public philanthropy: perfectly fine in its place, but at least partly a conspicuous declaration about the size of the benefactor’s bank balance and their erudite/altruistic/artistic instincts.
Not so long ago, presents – unless it was the gold watch marking 40 years of service – were personal, even intimate. Now everyone gives them and appears to expect to get them back too. At some point in recent history, for example, it became common to give the class teacher something, and not just at Christmas but at the end of every term.
Evenings out turn into an anguished dilemma, particularly for those of us deficient in the jam-making department. How big a box of chocolates, precisely? And, sometimes, what’s the sell-by date? How old is too old?
But worse are birthdays. It is an unavoidable truth that, barring terrible luck or a sudden domestic rupture, the older your friends get, the less they need. That spawns the awful tyranny of the group gift: the pooling of resources to buy something they still don’t want, but which is now too expensive to take to Age Concern. And worst of all is a Christmas with extended family whose age, creed or ethnicity – let alone their tastes – may all be completely unknown. You just can’t give gifts to strangers, unless their need is obvious and it’s in your power to meet it, as in the case of the kid hitchhiking down a country lane.
There’s really only one rule of present-giving, which is that the gift is the product not of a panic-stricken rush to Amazon but of thoughtfulness. It’s much more thrilling to know that someone has taken trouble than that they have maxed out their credit card.
We need a new deal, with less guilt and less tyranny. Restricting the giving of presents to someone you know well enough to understand what they will enjoy could be one guiding principle. Remembering that it’s much nicer to be given a single chocolate in mid-afternoon, when your body clock has stopped, than to get a box of them once a year, would be another. In the end, imagination is the best thing in life – and it’s still free.
