Sunday column: Giving edition

Today’s column is online here. It’s about gift-giving, surprise! I still think this Perspectives piece is one of the better things I’ve written on the topic:

Giving gifts serves symbolic functions—cementing relationships, celebrating life transitions—as well as the practical one of providing people with stuff they need. And this is at the crux of today’s etiquette dilemmas: For the first time ever, most of us have too much stuff and not enough money.

How are you handling gift-giving this season? My husband and I rarely buy each other gifts. The things we like–old paperback mysteries for him, art and clothes for me–are so idiosyncratic that we have to shop for ourselves. We buy each other little food treats quite often, but not actual presents.

We’re visiting my mother in Missouri this weekend, and I’d brought her a big bag of halvah because you can’t get halvah in the Ozarks. (My mother knows this for a fact because she called the only synagogue in Springfield and asked the rabbi if he knew where she could score any, a conversation that must have been truly epic.) But my mother’s taste buds have changed, apparently, because old age is a curse, and now she doesn’t like halvah.

I am getting ready to head over to her nursing home now and I suspect we might be having a difficult conversation about Christmas. My mother is almost completely incapacitated, and on Medicaid. For Christmas this year I will buy her the new shoes she wants, and a month of physical therapy, which she enjoys but which Medicaid won’t pay for anymore, because she is not improving.

No gift I can give her will make up for the fact that she cannot give to anyone, or do for anyone, any more. No gift can make up for the pain of being always a recipient, never a giver.