Presenting a disaster
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
It may not be scientific (yet) but I am convinced there is a rampant
gift-buying gene deficiency lurking out there.
This permanent condition is usually passed gleefully from father to
son (occasionally to daughters) rendering them helpless and useless
when buying presents for others.
These people are easy to spot. When the closing bell is going in any
store, they're the empty-handed ones standing stock-still, panicked
eyes darting around, hoping to latch on to something - anything.
Getting increasingly desperate at the imminent failure of their
mission (they can't go home with nothing ), they'll converge on
whatever scraps are left - old, discolored chocolates, crude plastic
flowers, woollen tree-frog bedsocks. They'll have a fist fight over
the last asthma nebuliser, even if they don't know what it is.
If they run out of time, they'll converge on the late-night
chemists, servos, $2 shops, “whatever's open”, to buy last-minute gifts that
are as inappropriate as they are just plain stupid. Thus, the gifts
they end up with scream: “Wow, this is both trashy and thoughtless.
Lucky you.”
One such joyous moment happened to me in the Christmas of 1992. My
own dad's hand-picked gift was a white, dusty ashtray on which was
inscribed “ake lov ot var”. It might once have read “Make love
not war” but it was hard to tell because the lettering had flaked off
over the years.
On the rim of this rare treat was one pair of footprints facing
another pair. But only one pair of the feet were close together -
the other set had a foot on either side of this first pair. It was a
pose so tacky that if you looked up the word in the dictionary, a picture
of this ashtray probably appears.
Oh, and did I mention I don't smoke?
Anyway, at the time, I blinked uncomprehendingly at Dad, only to be
met with a big, sheepish Hagar grin - which implied “Well I
didn't entirely forget you this Christmas”. As I gave the ashtray a
decent burial later, I remember thinking, “The man has clearly lost
it.”
That was until I found he was not alone - that there were masses of
people similarly afflicted and busily inflicting tackiness on loved
ones everywhere.
One friend tells of her husband who came home very late on her
birthday one year, bearing a single gift.
Joyful he had actually remembered, she ripped off the butcher's
paper to find . . . a child's plastic wand. Filled with liquid and
glitter.
He ignored her glare and shrugged as if to say: “Something is
better than nothing, my princess.”
Her heavily censored reply went something along the lines of: “Oh
darn, that's not quite what I was expecting. Perhaps you'd now like
to kick my cat and paint my car mauve?”
Through gritted teeth, she declared that “late-night stores have a
lot to answer for” and then vowed vengeance. Her solution: the
off-chocolate and bad-joke gift recipients of the world should unite
and petition all late-night stores to stock only “grossly
expensive” gifts.
Thus, the results will be magic. When any genetically deficient gift
buyer disappears at 9 o'clock on that special night and comes back
fuming, those at home will be smiling. They'll know, at long last,
they're not getting the frog socks this year.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 17 DEC 1996