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'Tis getting to be the season...
Paula blogged today about gift-buying and gift cards, and it got me to thinking. Of course, it got me to thinking "holy crap, it'll be Christmas before we know it!" but it also got me thinking about the process more generally. Paula makes a number of good points about the way that gift-giving has exploded and how difficult it gets to be to give kids (or, let's face it, anyone) gifts as they get older. I suspect, however, that these two facts are twin sides of a coin. She talks particularly about the relationship between grandchildren and grandkids, so I'll start there as well, though my thoughts here are hardly directed at the situation Paula describes.
In our society, even in the best of families, the generations have become increasingly disconnected from one another. In many cases, this separation is physical as children are increasingly likely to move away from their parents, leading to grandchildren who see their grandparents with relative infrequency. Even when this is not the case, the two are often divided culturally: in traditional societies, the various generations live near each other (often in the same house!) and influence one another more directly, particularly in a downward direction from older to the younger generation that looks up to the older. Increasingly, children have less interest in spending time with their grandparents or learning from them, resulting in grandparents who are more and more distant from their grandchildren.
In such a situation, grandparents are unlikely to have much of an idea of what children want or, for that matter, need. Conversely, if the gift they receive is not what they want, lacking the close relationship with grandparents, the youngsters are fairly unlikely to bother puzzling over the utility of a gift that lacks immediate appeal. This is, of course, especially true given the sheer quantity of gifts that many children, why should they invest time or thought in understanding what a "dud" gift might actually offer?
The other side of the coin that I mentioned earlier is that, as they know their grandchildren less and less, they are increasingly likely to express the affection that they wish existed between them through material gifts, often the more expensive the better for the purpose.
I think it's telling, though, that the same issues persist in other relationships: we just don't know what to get some person to whom we would really like to give a gift (or feel obliged), which is ultimately a symptom of not knowing the person that well. That's okay, of course: we can be close enough to someone to want to give a gift without knowing the person well enough to know the "perfect" gift to give, but still, it's telling, isn't it? How many people in your life can you say that you know exactly the perfect gift to give? What does this number say to you?