Anticipation of Santa’s unloading of gifts was tickled this 2011 holiday season by ghosts of holidays past in my household. It seemed appropriate, as Eric and I have gotten hooked on the FX channel’s “American Horror Story” series about a haunted house in Southern California. For the last few weeks we’ve been getting caught up on recorded episodes so the power of ghosts has been especially tangible.
This year, instead of making holiday Wish Lists for a gift exchange between the two of us, Eric suggested we make a joint Gratitude List. Given that I hate shopping and crowds, I readily gave his idea the thumbs-up. The decision was part austerity plan and part stress-reduction attempt. Money is tight due to a drop in Eric’s December/January workload and income, not to mention several unexpected expenses and challenges this past year. In the New Year, we will need to have three rotting decks replaced, and it is going to cost a pretty penny to drill five to seven new supports into bedrock and rebuild the decks themselves. The last few months have been stressful with moving Eric’s mother into an assisted living facility in Michigan, the loss of a close friend, and illnesses of other friends. We always look forward to the holiday season, but felt the need to tone it down a notch. Far from being Scrooges (for gifts to others, we purchased new items), our circumstances prompted us to take a good look at everything we already have, and realize how grateful we are for it.
What we found was eye-opening. We are blessed with loving family, friends and neighbors, a spacious home in a beautiful neighborhood, satisfying careers, food on the table, a delightful canine pal — and more stuff than we have had time to appreciate.
All that stuff! All stuff we wanted, stuff that had been on previous years’ Wish Lists; so it wasn’t an issue of having received junk we had no interest in. The excitement of new releases and momentary needs/desires had fueled our past gift giving. But when that holiday’s bustle gave way to a new year, priorities of the moment pushed holiday acquisitions aside, like the forgotten toys in “Toy Story 3.” We shed a few tears for the neglected objects on our own home’s shelves and promised that this year we would embrace them fully (at least in the movie version of this story).
In the weeks before Christmas, we made a table in MS Word with columns of category headings. We printed it out, put it on a holiday-red clipboard, and went around the house and made notes. There were books, DVDs, games, puzzles, clothes, etc. from previous Christmases that we had yet to read, watch, play, or use. Some were still shrink-wrapped! With our 2011 Gratitude List partially filled out, we initially thought we would spend Christmas morning selecting items off of the list to take down from the shelf and put to use.
At around 6 p.m. on December 23, we finally had the time and energy to look for a Christmas tree. By that point some really nice trees at the Rite Aid drug store had been marked down by 50 percent. Though a bright shining star didn’t suddenly appear in the sky, I took the mark-down as a sign that the angels supported our frugal holiday celebration. (The store manager was probably just afraid of getting stuck with over a dozen trees. Regardless, it was a win-win.) We picked out a bushy six-foot-tall tree, and I stood guard on the walk outside the store while Eric went in and paid for it. (Last year I went by myself to get the tree, and after ripping off the price tag to take in to the cashier, I set the tree to the back and off to the side. When I came out from paying for it, some guy in front of me in the checkout line had taken my tree, leaving behind an inferior tree he had bought. Infuriating!) We stuffed the tree into the back seat of the car and by bedtime, the tree was decorated and half a quart of eggnog and rum had been consumed.
The next morning, on Christmas Eve day, since we had a tree with no gifts under it, we decided we would wrap at least some of the forgotten gifts of Christmases past. During the course of the day, we took turns collecting items from the list and hiding them from the other until we could wrap them. We both came across things that weren’t on the list (which was good to create some element of surprise). A wrapping station was set up in my office, and we took turns using it. Later, we admitted that after a point, we had both felt a little silly rewrapping the former gifts, and stopped before wrapping everything we had collected or that was on the list. Still, we ended up with 16 wrapped packages, tags and bows included, under the tree.
On Christmas morning, Eric walked the dog, we had our coffee, and he called his mother and his sister before we opened presents. (We had a Skype call on the 26th with my family when they all were gathered at my brother’s house.) As is tradition, I sorted the packages into two piles. Since many of the gifts were labeled to us both, I placed eight presents in front of each of our chairs, and we took turns opening them.
Eric had written clever notes on the tags with clues to their contents and history, so I read them aloud before ripping the packages open. I was more succinct with my tags, and near the end of my wrapping frenzy, had labeled one of the excellent gifts that had originally come from friends as TO: Us, FROM: Them. While items from the list were expected, both of us were surprised by a couple of gifts we had found in our search. Eric had forgotten about a DVD set of early Disney short animated movies. This had been given years before we visited the superb Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, which had renewed our interest in Walt Disney’s early innovations. I was surprised by a gift that Eric wrapped this year, which I had originally given to him on one of our first Christmases 15 years ago: an unused mosaic tile craft set, a hobby he once had.
Not surprisingly, we didn’t re-gift any electronic gadgets, as those are pretty much well used, except for a Wii fitness mat and software (which we really SHOULD use!) For his birthday this year, Eric replaced his old Razr phone with an Android smart-phone. For the fun of it, he used his phone to scan the barcodes of all the opened presents, and I kept a handwritten tally. We found we had re-gifted several hundred dollars’ worth of “new” presents.
We were both pleased with the outcome of our experiment. There was less anxiety about shopping for the perfect gifts, and less anxiety about opening gifts that might be a disappointment, not to mention going further into debt. Opening the gifts was genuinely fun—I felt strangely content and joyful opening what were essentially new but familiar belongings. To ensure the gifts weren’t unused this time around, we immediately drew up a plan for the vacation week we both scheduled between Christmas and New Year’s. If we could squeeze in one or two movies per day, begin one jigsaw puzzle and a Wii fitness program together, and at least read part of a book, we would be off to a good start.
Admittedly, it’s an ambitious plan that may be a challenge to maintain, as has been the case after every Christmas holiday. For that dilemma of abundance, though, we are certainly grateful. To be honest, my concern is that once again, when the holidays are over and reality sets in, we won’t find time to watch all of the movies or read all the books by next Christmas. It’s some comfort to know that if that happens with our 2011 re-gifted presents, back under the tree they go!
