Survival Christmas, Christmas presents, Spending on gifts for Christmas part 2

Posted by dodo

I also like double presents: a pretty vase filled with coffee- flavoured chocolate beans, or a Beatrix Potter box with a fiver inside, or presents that last, like a year’s subscription to Private Eye, the Spectator or the Taller. Not having young children any more, I find it very difficult imagining what my small godchildren would like. If you ask a shop assistant whether some toy would be suitable for a child of five, she always says yes.

For a child under a year, you don’t have to buy them anything: just wrap up empty boxes — all they like is tearing at ^..8coloured paper.

Such is the power of the media that children usually want the toy most advertised on television. Last year it was the Transformer toy and My Little Pony. Prince William got the first and went one-up on the second, getting a real Shetland pony of his own. Prince Harry had to make do with Beatrix Potter pictures. When the permissive society was at its height, the most popular toy was a doll with a willy called Little Christopher; mercifully, most of the willies broke off in the post.

Children grow up so fast; do check how old they are. Remember the story of Jean Cocteau, who, when reproached by a female friend for neglecting his godchild, immediately dispatched a vast teddy bear.

`Was he thrilled?’ he asked the mother when he bumped into her a week later.

`Not at all,’ she said sourly, ‘He’s a colonel now.’

If you give clothes to the children of a working mother, try and get the sizes right, because she will never find the time to change them. Also, avoid giving them presents that have to be made up. Our attic upstairs groans with unused chemistry sets, untouched jigsaw puzzles, unassembled kits and model aeroplanes, and corn dollies that were never made. (Perhaps the latter should have got together with Little Christopher.)

Try not to over-buy. As a mother at Christmas, particularly if you’re working, you may feel riddled with guilt because you have not been spending enough time with your children, and consequently bankrupt yourself on extra and expensive presents. You have only to look at the sea of over-priced plastic, strewn unplayed-with over the nursery floor on Boxing Day, to realise that you have over-reacted.

It’s hard to find the perfect presents for teenagers, because they usually want paraphernalia to attract the opposite sex, and, as teenage fashions change with the speed of light, anything a centimetre too short or too long will be chucked out. My poor daughter got fifteen pairs of legwarmers the year before last and never wore any because they were no longer fashionable.

You’re usually safe with record tokens and Way In or Miss Selfridge gift tokens. Another very good present, if teenagers are into parties, is a voucher to hire a ball dress for the night from One Night Stand at 44 Pimlico Road, London. Vast, dark, baggy jerseys are popular with both sexes. Don’t do what I did last year, which was to buy wildly fashionable jewellery, tights and jerseys for all my nieces and teenage goddaughters and then be quite unable to resist wearing them myself. I then had to go out and buy a whole lot more presents.

Teenage boys always push their luck, like Adrian Mole asking his mother, who was on social security, for a word processor, a portable colour television or an electric typewriter. Similarly, last year my son suggested I give him a hi-fi or a shot gun; and when I bleated that I couldn’t afford it, he replied with perfect logic that I could have, if I hadn’t spent my time during the past year pouring drink down other people’s throats.

You can be sure that any good suggestions for teenage boys featured in the paper — the key-ring that whistled back at you when you whistled for it, the alarm clock that stopped bleeping when you shouted at it, but bleeped again five minutes later and carried on until you got up — will be sold out when you get to the shop, so telephone first to check.

Men are almost more difficult than teenage boys. Having no colour sense, and being blonde and blue-eyed, with a dark- haired, dark-eyed husband, I tend to rush up to terrified dark- eyed, dark-haired shop assistants thrusting purple shirts dripping with pins against their bosoms, with one eye closed (so they think I’m winking) saying, ‘Does this colour suit you?’ They always say yes.

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