Guide to Holiday Gift-Giving

Not to be all Bah Humbug on Christmas, but the gift-giving part of the Holiday season has become a little ridiculous. It’s basically a war of misplaced thoughtfulness and false thanking. If somebody gets you something amazing, you feel burdened by gratitude and anxious about what you got them. If they get you something that sucks, you have to pretend you love it, and then you get pissed off about the time and effort you’ve spent on their gift.

To accomplish all of this, you’ve got to go to retail stores which are designed specifically to make dudes uncomfortable. You wander around these places and you can’t figure out why they don’t just have a place to sit anywhere, and why you feel so unnaturally exhausted while your girlfriend is seemingly enjoying herself so much. It’s because they want you gone. Retail establishments pump a very specific Y-chromosome targeting poison into their air ducts. It makes you so tired and stupid that, in the absence of available chairs, all you want in the world is to wait in the car and listen to oldies radio. I’m convinced of this.

If boyfriends didn’t exist, there would be chairs everywhere in these places. But as things are, they have to ward off dudes, because that eyeroll you give your girlfriend when she asks if you think something is cute is killing skirt sales. They put the skirts right there in front for a reason, and it’s so girlfriends will want to spend six months in Target deliberating over and eventually buying skirts they think are cute instead of just going to get the fucking Taboo game you’re there for, paying for it, and leaving in 20 minutes so you can go home and watch TNT like you want to. My girlfriend sometimes drags me along with her to go to places just so she won’t spend as much money or time. Like on purpose. Also I think she gets some amount of pleasure out of torturing me.

I hate it. The whole thing. You spend your whole life fighting against the stereotype of “women love to shop, hoo boy!” And then you get a girlfriend, and she’s great but she really loves to shop, and you’re like, “Ok, I guess it’s a cliche because it’s true. Here I am standing in the women’s wear section, holding a purse and a coat, while another shopping zombie man like me awkwardly describes sweater colors into his cell phone, which clearly has a very impatient wife on the other end. I’m overhearing every agonizing word, and from what I can tell, he wishes he was dead. I would too. I also have no idea what the difference is between salmon and coral. I can’t believe I’m feeling relieved that all I have to do is hold a coat and a purse while standing in the women’s wear section for 45 minutes while my girlfriend tries on cute skirts. I thought I was living inside of a nightmare, but it turns out my life right now is a petty humiliation and inconvenience compared to salmon vs. coral guy. And yet I still hate this with all of my heart. Goddamn, I’m tired. I want so badly just to go sit in the car and listen to the fucking Moody Blues until this horrible day is over. And I hate the Moody Blues.” Later you will catch yourself humming “Nights in White Satin” and wonder what the fuck happened to your life.

That is, more or less, the magic of shopping. And Christmas is a holiday that requires shopping. Sometimes girls say, “You hate Christmas,” or, “I love Christmas,” when they really mean “You hate shopping,” or, “I love shopping.” This is unfair. Dudes don’t hate Christmas. Dudes hate shopping, traffic, and cheap sentiment. Unfortunately, Christmas is 90% shopping, traffic, and cheap sentiment. It’s not our fault. We still like Christmas. We like Bing Crosby, getting drunk on egg nog, sharing blankets with our shopaholic girlfriends and drinking cocoa with rum in it while watching It’s a Wonderful Life, ice skating, Christmas lights, holiday parties, and futzing around with toys. We only hate shopping and traffic. And cheap sentiment. Ok, some cheap sentiment is fine. It’s Christmas. But still bullsh on traffic and shopping, and especially traffic you have to fight through to get to a shopping place. That’s the worst.

But of course you have to get gifts for people, because those people are getting gifts for you, and if your gift sucks you will feel awful.

I buy everything online. I recommend it to every dude in the world. It’s the best. First of all, you get to do it at work while you’re getting paid to do something else that you’re not doing. This is a very efficient way to do things. Second of all, you get to… actually, there is no second of all. It’s just exactly like shopping, only you’re in a chair. That’s really all dudes want, is to sit. And if you do it at home, you can listen to the fucking Moody Blues at the same time if you want.

It’s the best.

But what do you get for people?

Ask. Then get stuff they want. If they’re evasive about what they want, dudes get Westerns and/or World War II movies on DVD and ladies get things that make them warm, like fuzzy socks and pajama bottoms and slippers. Grandmothers get things that make them smell like Grandmothers, or things they can eat with their delicate little Grandmother teeth, like a jelly sampler. People from the office get nothing. Maybe a card. Unless you’re the president of your office or you’ve got a staff of people who work for you, and then you can get them something nice, like a gift certificate to Amazon.com (that your employees can use to do their holiday shopping instead of working) or a pair of Dan Marino Isotoner gloves.

For girlfriends, you have to be careful. First of all, these are the people who are out there shopping for things for you with the same process of endlessly careful deliberation they use to decide on things for themselves. They claim that this makes whatever they get you a thoughtful gift, because it is a gift that for them is literally full of their thoughts. Believe it or not, she fretted over that windbreaker for nearly an hour, including conversations about color choice, size, price, and style with a clerk, two strangers, and her mother via cell phone. Yes. That windbreaker. The one that you can tell you’re only going to wear three times. It is the result of a mountain of effort, and you had better repay in kind.

Ask. It doesn’t hurt to ask. The other thing you can do is notice things she likes while she’s dragging you shopping, and then go back and get them later. It will likely be a cute skirt of some kind that you talked her out of. This is the one silver lining to going shopping with your girlfriend. When you talk her out of something because she doesn’t need it, and then you go back and buy that thing for her, it’s like a magic trick where all of a sudden she thinks you like shopping as much as she does, and you really get her, and even more interestingly, she thinks you agonized over this cute skirt as much as she did. Even though you didn’t. You just let her do all the work for you. And you don’t "get" her. And you still hate shopping as much as ever because you just had to go to the same place twice and there was nowhere to sit, and you didn’t know what size she is so you had to call her mother while some weird dude holding a purse and a coat looked at you funny while humming "Nights in White Satin." And now you probably also have to get your girlfriend's mother something. Shit.

Anyway, yeah. Go online. Sit down. Listen to the Moody Blues, and buy your girlfriend’s Mom a gourmet cheese sampler. The good news is you’ll be done with it soon enough. And there’s a Rocky marathon on TNT.