Survival Christmas, Christmas presents, Spending on gifts for Christmas part 1

Posted by dodo

Spending beyond their income on gifts for Christmas - Swing doors and crowded lifts and draperied jungles - What shall we buy for our husbands and sons Different from last year?

Every year it’s the same. In about October, I’m nudged by telephone calls from female relations, asking, what would my children and husband like for Christmas?

`I don’t know,’ I wail helplessly, thinking that if I had any remotely good ideas, I’d keep them to myself. ‘I expect they’d like money, but then wouldn’t we all?’

Then, unable to face the horror of buying at least a hundred presents, I deliberately forget about shopping until the week before Christmas. As a result I spend three times as much as I ought, out of guilt and panic. There’s nothing nice left in the shops. Everyone’s using credit cards, so there’s a half-hour wait, being goosed by other people’s rolls of wrapping-paper, at every till. It’s impossible to park because of euphemistically named Christmas pedestrianisation. Even in a town as civilised as Cirencester you need a helicopter. All the shop assistants are fed up, drunk and, in the men’s shops, getting off with each other: ‘You’ve got such a nice manner on the telephone, Mr Clissold.’

The Queen, according to the News of the World, buys `stocking fillers like embroidered cushions and dainty boxes’ from ‘a discreet businessman’ who calls every year at Buckingham Palace.

The difference was wonderful and amazing. I bought most of my presents in Cheltenham, which as a stylish provincial town is hard to beat. Unlike London, all the shops you need are close together. I managed to polish off about fifty presents in one six-hour session.

Try and shop alone, then you can potter and move around without distraction. Leave the children with a girlfriend one day, and take her children, so that she can shop, on another. If you’re working, a late-night shop opening early in December is far less harrowing or buffeting than lunch hours or Saturdays.

The next problem is what to buy. So many people spend so much money on useless presents — ‘bath salts, and inexpensive scent’, as John Betjeman put it, ‘and hideous tie so kindly meant’ — that it’s a pity that grown-ups as well as children can’t all write letters to Father Christmas in November listing what they want, which instead of vanishing up the chimney could be circulated to their relations.

One of the most skilled present-givers I know recommends shopping at home with a pencil, then going out and buying what you’ve written down and nothing else. The best presents, she claims, are always brainwork, and no one can think with aching feet.

The other school of present-giver makes a list of people who need presents, and goes off to the shops to seek inspiration.

`I start shopping in October with wild enthusiasm,’ says my sister-in-law, ‘rushing out and buying things I like the look of. The problem comes in the middle of December when I have to fit the presents to the recipient. It never works, and I end up with a pair of lacey teenage knickers for the 89-year-old man who used to dig the garden, and a Bach cantata tape for my father-in-law who is not only stone deaf, but hasn’t got a tape recorder.’

The best presents are chosen with imagination, and convey the feeling that the giver has taken some trouble.

Another friend always tries to have a theme: one year she gave us all stunning mugs with our names on; another year she found old pine boxes of different shapes and sizes and had appropriate words and pictures painted on each one.

My husband, another inspired giver, digs out old sepia photographs of grandparents and great aunts on seaside donkeys or at picnics, and has them blown-up and framed for different members of the family. A good cheap idea is to find out the birth dates of everyone to whom you want to give a present, then mail the list to The Times, who send you back a Xerox of the front page of the paper on the day each person was born, wrapped like a scroll.

One Christmas my ex-housekeeper had the charming idea of giving me ten plates with photographs of all the family and each of the cats and dogs printed on them. Victorian name brooches are lovely too, but a bit hard to find if your name is Earl or Jody.

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