The Give-and-Get Machine

This Christmas season, by tidy coincidence, our family’s Twelve Days of Christmas will give to us six family members, Five Gold Rings, four restaurant dinners, three neighborhood gatherings, two Christmas concerts, and a downtown parade of horses, dogs, and Santa. As if that’s not enough “get” this year, we’ll also have a couple dozen presents under the Christmas tree… most processed through the Give-and-Get Machine.

I’ll get to the Machine in a minute but let’s start with the exception.  In early October I walked into a local retailer, picked out a gift for my wife, and handed over a credit card.  In exchange, the clerk handed over my purchase in a small paper bag.  I took it home, wrapped it myself, and – two months later – placed it lovingly under the Christmas tree.  If you’re thinking, Man you went to a lot of trouble, Dave – I sure hope your wife appreciates it, then you, my friend, are a product of the Machine.

What is the Give-and-Get Machine?  It’s technology’s approach to gifting.  When you choose to give a gift this year, nine times out of ten you’ll plop down on the couch, open your laptop, and navigate to your favorite e-commerce website.  If you don’t know what to give, you can choose between “Last Minute Deals” or “Top Picks for You” (based on previous spending).  Once you decide, you’re probably less than five clicks from the finish line, especially if your recipient is in your “Address Book” and you’ve already stored your personal information.  Add to shopping cart, choose delivery address, confirm purchase, and you’re done.  But wait!  You can also add gift wrapping and a message for a few more pennies.  Well now, aren’t you the savvy gift-giver!

The convenience of the Give-and-Get Machine is undeniable.  After all, my purchase in October meant a one-hour roundtrip drive, to a shop where I may or may not have found something.  Add another fifteen minutes once I got home to wrap the gift and add the To:/From: tag.  You, meanwhile, accomplished the same “task” in maybe ten minutes, with a mug of hot chocolate and a few keystrokes from the comfort of your kitchen table.

“Task” is the operative word in the last paragraph.  Gifting should spring from the heart instead of the Task app of your smartphone, right?  Gifting should be a choice, not a chore.  Perhaps those of us who default to the easy-out Give-and-Get Machine are missing out on the real meaning of Christmas.

Admittedly, the Give-and-Get Machine includes some really nifty apps.  If you’ve ever used Gift Hero (“The Best Wish List Ever”) you know what I mean.  GH is the perfect solution for the family that exchanges gifts but has reached the age (or proximity) where no one knows what to get each other.  On GH each of you creates wish lists and the lists are shared with everyone else.  Once you choose a gift from another GH list it’s marked as “taken” to avoid duplicates.  Most gifts are hyperlinked to merchant websites for easy purchase, and you can add notes like color, size, and quantity.  Also, GH blocks you from knowing what has been taken from your own list by whom, so the element of surprise remains.

There’s an endless debate with apps like GH.  I mean, let’s be honest, it’s easy to skip any and all effort to be thoughtful about what somebody wants for Christmas when you have their list right in front of you.  On the other hand, you avoid the occasional embarrassing face-to-face exchange, where the recipient insists I love it when in fact they really don’t, and will probably regift it next Christmas.

Ultimately, the almighty dollar may be the decider between a gift from a store or the Give-and-Get Machine.  My wife and I found a nice assortment of books and toys for our Colorado granddaughters this year, at stores we visited both near and far.  We wrapped them all up, put them in a large box, and drove down to the post office.  The clerk measured the box and its weight and informed me the shipment “had to go by plane” instead of anything cheaper.  The cost was more than my annual subscription to Amazon Prime.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of the Give-and-Get Machine after all.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

14 thoughts on “The Give-and-Get Machine”

  1. This year I told my wife, let’s make gifting easier this year and just give our grandkids (all adults now) Amazon gift cards so we don’t have to operate the machine for them. They can just do that on their own.

    But, every week since we agreed to that, my wife comes with bags of, “Just something fun I found at the store for X.” Looks like their getting presents and gift cards.

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  2. Some describe it as cold hard ‘cash’ – but we like to put it into some sort of festive container we hand craft and then give our grown children an advance on their inheritance.
    All the rest of the gift giving within the family is usually accomplished by making a donation to a program in our community that puts together a complete Christmas hamper for needy families. The hamper includes age suitable gifts and food for a Christmas dinner.

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    1. I love the handcrafted container idea, Margy, because we’ve reached that same “brand” of gift-giving in our family but it seems impersonal. And the charitable giving – a habit we’re trying to aspire to thanks to my own parents’ efforts – is the best idea of all, as long as it’s from the heart instead of just from the checkbook.

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  3. This kind of reminds me of the Jim Carey Grinch movie. It seems Christmas is so commercialized and all about the gifts these days. I find that it is hard to come up with things I want, so I just end up making of list of things I like but really don’t need. I did about 95% of my shopping except some stocking stuffers online.

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    1. Our son, who will be with us this year, said “as long as our annual Christmas traditions continue (ex. breakfast croissants, Christmas trivia)”, the rest doesn’t matter. Not a word about gifts. Looks like we raised him right 🙂

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  4. My wife and I have finally reached the point where we’ve moved beyond giving physical gifts (mostly; I still find a book or small Lego set under the tree) and instead give each other experiences. We just don’t need more stuff. Our kids don’t need that much, either, and we’re moving towards the experience thing for them as well. But the grandkids are a different story. They’ll find books and Legos and such under their tree from “Oma and Opa.” But they are books and Legos that we bought at a local store; we always want to support our local merchants as much as we can.

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    1. It’s something of a relief to reach this stage in gift-giving (we’re right where you are), because we don’t spend enough time with our kids anymore to really know what they want. Sounds cold/hard, but the flexibility of cash is what they appreciate right now. On the other hand, gifting to the grandkids is pure joy – a return to childhood Christmas.

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  5. You had me at “a downtown parade of horses” Dave. Now that is something I would like to see at Christmastime. I was fascinated with the idea of “Gift Hero” which is something I have never heard of before. I’m unique as to Christmas gifts. I do celebrate Christmas, but this year once again I didn’t decorate, I don’t bake and since I have no family, there are no gifts to buy or receive. I usually buy myself a gift but I don’t wrap it. My boss sends me a check for Christmas – we used to exchange presents when I worked on site but I haven’t seen him in person since October 2012. My friend Ann Marie generally stops by my house with baked goods but she is in the process of moving so I encouraged her to take a break from her breakneck holiday baking that she loves to do and lavish on friends. I like your ideas of gift giving, choosing presents from the heart and not dashing out at the last minute to find a gift or letting your fingers do the walking and clicking on your keyboard. One year my father bought my mother a soup pot. That didn’t go over so well!

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    1. They say the best chances of having your recipient return the gift you gave them is to choose it from a “best gifts” list – ha. I rarely fall for those lists (which you find everywhere during the holiday season) but I admit to looking at one or two. Yes, today is our town’s “Hoofbeats and Christmas Carols” parade, and there will be as many horses in the parade as people (and dozens of dogs). That’s the world we live in down here – it’s all about the horse 🙂

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  6. We kind of split the difference, with Marianne finding things online through the year and then me wrapping them all in December. This system usually requires some gift cards to even things out among our adult kids.

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    1. We’re all about the “even things out” approach too, J P. And kudos to your wife for thinking ahead, instead of stressing last-minute over what to gift like the rest of us do. In my mind her approach sort of legitimizes online shopping.

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