G is for Gratitude — and Great Gifting
How to gift better to infuse meaning, delight, and long lasting benefit
There is no holiday activity that elicits such immense satisfaction as finding the perfect gift to express deep understanding of the recipient, with just enough whimsey to bring pure joy. The whole thing, of course, wrapped artfully and delivered with care. I love to gift. But I don’t love the brain wracking, desperation to find something meaningful…and worst of all, the nagging hollow that forms when all the gifts have been opened, and life goes on unchanged, save for a little more stuff in our lives.
Last year my family and I unlocked something really special in the pursuit of meaningful gifting. Here’s what we did:
- Determined our New Year’s Resolutions early, and announced them to each other over our Thanksgiving meal
- Shopped throughout the holidays for gifts that would support each other in accomplishing those resolutions
- Explained how we hoped each gift would guide each other to success as we opened them all together
- Achieved each and every one of our New Year’s Resolutions (really, it happened)
Gratitude and intention go hand in hand
Thanksgiving is my favorite wintertime holiday because of the purity of it. Being grateful for the people we love and the world we live in, and showing our gratitude to each other. This lovely feeling fills me to the brim, and what overflows is an abundance of energy to do something. Productive use of this energy is good intentions, and formalized good intentions become resolutions.
My resolutions have rarely been a rousing success, and it is no wonder why. We set them at the end of the year, after a busy and draining holiday season as we are about to jump into a whole new year of the world around us getting back to work. There is hardly space to let these intentions gel and take residence in the safe and quiet part of our minds that will remind us throughout the year of what we want to achieve and who we want to be. The warmth and gratitude of Thanksgiving is the perfect incubator for these tender intentions.
We need community to accomplish our goals
Resolutions are lonely — quickly shared (sometimes) and even more quickly forgotten by those around us. With our little experiment, each of us came to Christmas morning with a room full of people who had spent a month thinking about what we wanted to accomplish and finding ways they could help and support us in achieving it. It was an absolutely lovely feeling.
The really special magic here was not just in the gift, but in a group of people who knew what you hoped to do with your year and who would hold you gently accountable to it.
But don’t get me wrong — the gifts were way better too. We got creative, with gifts spanning from the literal (a fitbit to support a workout goal) to the more capricious (a “power scarf” to bring superpowers to become a better teacher).
The uncontested winner of the day was given to my mom by her son in law. She hoped to spend less time worrying about the small stuff. He knocked it out of the park with a beautifully simple silver bracelet with a subtle engraving hidden on the inside reading fuck it.
Gift better
A quick peek into the various spiritual traditions and the reasons we give gifts this time of year reveals a wide variety of meaningful stories in which gift giving plays a part. Our culture has moved pretty far from these stories.
The story that unfolded this year — achieving all of our resolutions, checking in with each other on them, carefully considering this year’s resolutions as we head into Thanksgiving — This is the story that makes gifting and receiving work for me.
