Essay: THE ART OF GIVING

GIVING has never been easy—as the Magi, those first Christmas givers, discovered when they arrived with offerings fit for a king only to find a babe lying in a stable. Still, in the early centuries following that birth, giving was relatively simple. It meant giving up, a giving away of one’s self or one’s worldly goods in imitation of Christ. The matter grew more complex under the Protestant ethic, when gifts were bestowed as a reward or incentive for good behavior. St. Nick was long depicted as a scrawny saint who Carried presents in one hand and birch rods in the other. But the art of giving grows most difficult in this permanent holiday age of affluence, when, in the words of Poet Howard Nemerov, Santa Claus himself is an “overstuffed confidence man who climbs at night down chimneys, into dreams, with this world’s goods.”

What, in short, does one give in the Society that Has Everything? Giving to the really needy has become depersonalized. For the rest, it is all too often a compulsion. “The time of gift giving is a time of reckoning,” says Alvin W. Gouldner, sociology professor at St. Louis’ Washington University. “We reckon up where we stand and whom we wish to remain tied to. The giver has not only the anxiety of trying to guess what the recipient would like, but also the added anxiety of projecting a suitable image of himself.”

Delight & Blight

That is putting it in the sociologist’s typically unmerry way. But the thought does define one of the cardinal sins of giving; most presents are offered to please not the recipient but the giver. Half the time, the Collected Poems of Ezra Pound are chosen to show that the giver is an intellectual, not because the recipient might actually enjoy them. The situation is happily reversed if it is the recipient who is struggling to prove his intellectual status—then the book becomes a compliment, where Valley of the Dolls would have been an insult. This is particularly true with very good-looking girls, who always want to be taken seriously for their intellect (plain girls must never be given books, except possibly love poems).

Even in the delightful business of buying presents for children, the object often reflects the donor’s own desires—the football from the frustrated athlete, the telescope as a gentle push toward studiousness—rather than an understanding of the child’s inner world. Not that entering this world is easy; and, oddly, it gets harder as children grow older. The blight of depersonalization sets in with the increasing inclination of teen-agers to ask for and receive plain money. Explains one Boston 17-year-old, who insists on cold cash: “If they buy it, it’s always wrong.”

As for giving between husband and wife, that is virtually an index of the success of a marriage. Only in the closest of unions would a husband succeed in buying the right kind of antique Wedgwood vase; and if he knows the correct size for a half-slip, he almost knows too much. On the other hand, it takes more than love—profound intuition and knowledge of character—for a wife to choose the right necktie for her husband. In marital giving, moveover, there is a subtle language: the pingpong table as a gentle hint to the husband who does not spend enough time with his family; the overly luxurious gift from a straying husband trying to assuage his guilt.

One trend that takes all the surprise out of giving between spouses is the “stag shop” set up by many department stores. The wife comes in to fill out file cards listing several things she would like, and the husband dutifully appears to declare how much he can spend—and to make out his card, which his wife later uses as a guide. “Why not?” asked one woman in Seattle, setting down a description of a beige mink pillbox hat. “The year I didn’t fill out a card, my husband gave me a sink garbage disposer.” The system would have forestalled the contretemps of O’Henry’s young husband and wife in his celebrated story of mismatched sacrifice, The Gift of the Magi. But if the art of giving is to survive, there ought to be room for such mistakes—and such sentimentalists.

In that ever-widening circle of giving outside the family, Christmas sometimes takes on an aspect of the potlatch, a ceremony of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest, during which the chiefs showered gifts on each other. Their object was to surpass a rival in generosity, and to crush him under future obligations. To avoid this nowadays, ground rules must be observed. Within an office, the first move must come from the superior—and if the subordinate responds with a gift, it should be clearly less valuable.

Equally delicate is the choice of gift for people one knows but would like to know better. Here too, the need is for something that expresses warmth but nothing so intense as to be thought presumptuous—perhaps the silver thingumajig of indeterminate value but clearly stamped “Tiffany.” The wrong but frequently observed rule is that a gift for a rich friend-acquaintance has to be relatively expensive, while the present for a friend of lower income can be relatively cheap. Thus, the giver often finds himself sulkily spending more on those who enjoy it less. Actually, any present for someone richer than the giver should be pointedly inexpensive but thoughtful, like hand-knitted ear muffs.

Knowledge of the other person is essential to good giving, but here, as in other areas, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The information that someone is a music lover is insufficient. Unless his exact tastes are known, it is fatal to give him a recording (he is bound to have or to hate the Callas version of Tosca you have chosen). One ready but unfortunate way to avoid such pitfalls is the all-purpose gift. And even here, care should be taken; the generally safe basket of gourmet food may play havoc with a dieter.

Self & Skill

Through history, even the great and famous have found trouble with the choice of gifts. Queen Victoria was clearly desperate when, as the story goes, she presented Mount Kilimanjaro to Kaiser Wilhelm for his birthday. Yet, the grandly useless gift can be endearing, and while most Americans cannot give mountains, there are other possibilities. Among them is the sauna built for one, developed by New York’s Hammacher Schlemmer as an alternative to the standard size (“because it isn’t easy to find the right five people to take a sauna together”). The Dauphin of France set a standard for the anti-gift when he presented the young Henry V with tennis balls, in insolent reference to his playboy reputation, and paid the price at Agincourt. Modern givers who want to choose an offensive present designed to break relations have a dizzyingly wide choice, ranging from a novelty ice tray that produces cubes in the form of nudes to a cookbook entitled something like The Favorite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor.

Emerson said that the only true gift is a gift of self. All the greatest presents bear him out, whether it is Cleopatra offering herself to Caesar wrapped in a rug, or—on a more spiritual plane—the Juggler of Our Lady giving all he has: his little art. Not everyone can offer his own composition, as Richard Wagner did when he gave the Siegfried Idyll to his wife. But the art of giving would be immensely enhanced if more people today took whatever skill and time they had to make gifts themselves.

Today, the gift of time is perhaps the most important, even if it is ritualized: any society needs rituals. The true gift of the Magi was not the myrrh, frankincense and gold but the time and trouble they took to bring them. The effort —and its modern-day equivalent of hours at crowded counters—can also be a testimony of concern, also a gift of self.