The Spirit of Giving

The gifts have been opened, and the crowds of the world can now breathe a final united sigh of relief, as the crazy holiday wave to go out and find something nice for people has finally crashed into their unsuspecting victims(plus their paycheck fattened bank accounts) and is now slowly settling back to that deep, strange place where insidious marketing gimmicks and earnest human interests cuddle.

And there are the few who never managed to send out(or even purchase) these treasured trinkets of appreciation before the roads emptied and the night realized in every home the merry-making of the holidays. For them the gesture is more of a resigned shrug, a satisfying abandonment of the curious hassle so many people seem to get wrapped up in.  I've been a faithful member of this club for a few years now, lending to the fact I've only started working now and haven't got cash to trade trinkets with.

But this year, I'm exercising my right to suffer along with the crazies who dive into malls on holidays and commute on roads reduced to speeds never before seen except among lines snaking from gift-wrapping sections. And dutifully, I've struggled my fair share.

And when I wrapped up the last of my gifts, I fooled myself into thinking it was over.  Lo and behold, the delightfully tragic cycle of giving too much and giving too little was, by and large, never over until you start opening your own gifts.  Where if the whole act of exchanging presents were graphed by the amount of drama involved, the sounds of wrappers unwrapping would signal the climax like rending cymbals and glibly cue some introspection: an attempt to judge the value of your friends by the gifts they give, and, most painfully, why I couldn't give them better gifts--gifts they deserved.

And since I love making math out of things that shouldn't, there were 3 types of gifts I encountered underneath our Christmas tree in the sleepy silence of Christmas morning.  I've ranked them by how I felt about them: emotional impact, drama, pathos, from sucky to smashing:

gifts gone or just as good as

... bitter, bitter, bitter: these are pretty much composed of all those gifts you would have gotten if you sent out your gifts earlier and bothered your monito/monita with holiday guilt.  Or maybe, these are the gifts that never made it due to the financial crisis, logistics or simply because there wasn't anything to send out.  Or perhaps they did reach you, but for the same sad reasons, came in as nameless mugs and dime-store picture frames--which still took some appreciable effort(recycled?), but is still just as unsatisfying.

I pretty much don't mind not receiving presents from people--heck, it's easier on the conscience. Though it would be nice if I didn't have to spend most of Christmas morning unwrapping my mom's stacks and stacks of umbrella's and planners with corporate logos plastered all over.  The exception applies to all my godfathers and godmothers out there, I'm dreadfully disappointed--15 years and counting.

gifts of equal exchange

.. a lot more satisfying than not getting any gifts, of course, is getting gifts.  These are the instances when whatever you send out, you get back; the machinations of Christmas succeeding.  Like our forefather who made a trade of shells and shiny rocks, the most economical of gifts are the ones we appreciate most.  Everyone's happy, nothing to see here.

gifts undeserved

... and then there are these kind of gifts that leave a tangy bitter sweet flavor in the soul.  Being the type to play it safe and expect nothing of people, it devastates me whenever I receive an unexpectedly nice gift, an unexpected person gives me a gift, or worse, both.  The cynical voice in my head whispers bribery, which is why I avoid giving gifts to people who don't expect it. But when I get gifts, it's like "Whoa, somebody cared enough."  I'm emo that way, and chivalrous enough to try and make some kind of recompense in the form of belated New Year's presents.

I appreciate those unexpected gifts best because I learn from them the most and they often lead to new friends and, of course, new goodies. But in equal fashion, these gifts bother my conscience in hefty measures.

So for next year, I'm orchestrating a retaliation. For next year's resolution: start looking for gifts as early as next week--packages of desire and delight that I'll send out not because I feel indebted, but because I want to let people know I care, too.

cherry stems and other pursuits

Last Sunday, my folks and I stopped by Iceberg, Makati to celebrate belatedly my dad's birth about 60 years ago.  Being one of the restaurant chains old enough to be included in the list of places my parents used to date, as well as probably being the site where the relationship that eventually brought me into this world must have incubated, it wasn't surprising to find my parents becoming more candid than usual concerning their personal matters.

And for this session, my mom shared one particular oratory talent I never knew she had.  Aside from my mom's superior grasp of diction and other such faculties relating to language (to a fault sometimes, as most kids with sharp-tongued mothers can attest to), she also demonstrated her skills when it comes to a certain infamous cocktail party maneuver: the cherry stem knot.

Thinking it hereditary thing, I snatched the 1000 calorie morsel for myself from my mom's banana-chocolate parfait and proceeded to discover if I had such a mandibular talent.   "The concept was fairly easy", I thought while rearranging the residents of my mouth.  "I just had to whirl the whole stem around as a circle, then twist the two ends around each other."  5 minutes and one very bitter twig in my mouth later, I spat the slightly chewed stem into a tissue and decided that more thought and skill was required before I can "wow the ladies".

My mom reassured me of her skills and was wrestling with her own cherry stem--now taken from my dad's banana split--before I can even say, "I'd rather I didn't see my own mother being a little too creative with the possible uses of her tongue."

While my mom was quietly, but quite vigorously, impersonating a calm kid chewing an astonishingly tough wad of gum, my Dad echoed my interest in the matter as he mentioned that my Mom "has claimed" before of performing such a feat but never really witnessing the actual act.

And just as suddenly as she set out to begin the task did she prove her impressive command over her teeth-tongue coordination: a nearly knotted stem lay on another piece of tissue.  She said that she discovered this skill when the in-house lawyer of their office boasted of it, and being the achiever that she is, found out she can, too.  She said that all there was to it was to fervently believe that it was possible, and that she can do it, even if this time around the false teeth where kind of in the way.

And that line struck me.  This last 3 months have established themselves as the busiest in my life, ev~ah.  Gone were the times when I was just so busy, I can't sleep/eat/be happy/be myself anymore.  The level of busy I've graduated into(or shackled myself to) is the kind of busy that you don't get anything done anymore.  The concept of priorities have faded when everything you're doing is important, is pivotal, is due NOW.

I felt the burden of it, but I will not complain. I chose this for myself, and I stand by my choice.  But now, I'm more aware of my capabilities, that in spite of my illusions of grandeur, I can only do so much.  I was resolved, but sacrifices were made in order to keep up.  And one of those sacrifices was the formerly indestructible confidence I rallied in such a tight-spot as I am in now.

It hurt a lot to admit this, but I'm discovering other things in this strange world of "can't" and "for the sake of my mental health, won't".  I'm discovering the "power of no" but still have not fully reigned in the horses yet on the subject.  

In this case for example, my mom did okay, headstrong and unwavering in her belief that cherry stems were just as easy to knot with jointed fingers as opposed to saliva-slathered organs.  So the light at the end of the tunnel persists, and perseverance still prevails, in the foolhardy paradigm my parents have nurtured in me.

But, I still have to learn to pace myself.  I just know that I have to learn this skill: saying no now so I can say yes to something better later on.  Soon, before I choke on the not-so-proverbial-but-contextually-apt cherry stem of misplaced goals.