A story that captivates me time and again is the Gift of the Magi by O.Henry. Jim and Della sacrifice their best possessions to gift each other. Jim sells his watch to buy Della a pair of ivory hair clips and Della sells her hair to buy Jim a platinum chain for his watch. Both can’t use their gifts but the story speaks volumes about the love they had for each other .
With Christmas round the corner and people buying gifts for each other a small anecdote narrated by a friend of mine set me thinking. She had purchased gifts for some close friends of hers whom she was meeting after a long time. Very enthusiastically she gifted them to her friends when she met them. But she was in for a shock. Her friend 'rejected' the gift saying that she wouldn’t use the gift. Slightly disappointed at having made the wrong choice, she showed her few other gifts she had picked for some other people. But those too were rejected as they were not to 'the taste' of the recipient. This friend of mine left the house dejected that her friend wasn’t able to appreciate the trouble taken by her to choose a gift for her.
In as much as gifting is an art, so is receiving a gift and I think a dying one. People seem to have forgotten the art of receiving gifts. In our aim to maintain our individuality and keep our personal space, we do at times end up being highly self centred and narrow minded. We over look the emotions of the person who has bought the gift for us. We deride their ability to choose things for us.
To avoid duplication of articles got at weddings or birthday parties, the trend to reduce accepting gifts at almost all occasions seems to be on the rise. Gifts at weddings and birthdays may be more of a social compulsion (resulting in return gifts too), but equating them with personal gifts is almost trivialising the sentiments involved.
A gift is a token of love and affection. And it doesn’t hurt to keep the other person happy by saying a thank you...if not for the gift itself, but for the thought that has gone into it, for the time they have spent on choosing it and for the fact that there is someone in this world who cares to care about you.
