Dear Miss Eliza: What to buy the Picky someone on your list
Dear Miss Eliza,My mother is a hard one to please. NO matter what I get her for Christmas or her birthday or Mother’s day or just to say, "Thanks for being my mom," she never, ever likes it.
Sure, she’ll pretend to like it for a few seconds after she unwraps it, but it’s a fake kind of liking it, you know what I mean? So with Christmas coming up soon, I just don’t know what to do. Any ideas what you give someone who doesn’t like anything you give them?
- Giftwrapping a void
Dear Giftwrapping,
Did you ever see that birthday card shaped like a pickle? You open it up and it says, "I bet you didn’t expect to get a paper pickle for your birthday," (Plagiarism note: Obviously I should be crediting the maker of this card, but I don’t know who it was. Suffice it to say I didn’t come up with it myself.) ? Well the greeting card can teach a valuable gift giving philosophy: If something is worth failing, it’s worth failing well.
There’s no right answer for what to get your mother for Christmas. There are only answers that fail the approval test. What you want to give her is a gift that says, "Mom, I know this isn’t good enough, but I love you enough to have come to grips with that fact. Please to understand what kind of a position you’ve put me in. It’s a real pickle."
So how do you go about picking the perfectly wrong present? Rule 1. Don’t waste a lot of money. Money should be spent on doing things right, like building a new school or eating good food. A good rule of thumb about how much to spend to do something wrong: How much change did you find the last time you scoured the sofa cushions? Subtract all the quarters from that. Quarters are invaluable.
Rule 2. Even the wrong present should make a statement. (see gift giving philosophy above) What do you want to tell your mother? "Mom, you need to learn to better disguise your disapproval." Or, "I try so hard, why can’t you love me?" And then there’s my personal favorite, "You know what’s fun? Using orange juice to season a turkey." Each of these things can be conveyed with a simple item clothed in wrapping paper and decorated with a bow.
From your letter, I get the feeling that you’re trying to tell your mother, "I just don’t understand you." To show this in a present, I’d start her off with the paper pickle card, and inside jot down a web address like http://www.iqtest.com/ and that ought to take care of it.
- Miss Eliza
posted by Sarah Eliza @ 9:13 AM
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