As the Christ­mas hol­i­days near, I find myself think­ing about gift­ing strate­gies — what’s the right thing to do for both giver and receiver.

I used to pride myself on mak­ing or find­ing that spe­cial some­thing that would delight the recip­i­ent, with­out being either too lav­ish or too stingy. Com­ing up with just the right per­sonal gift requires an under­stand­ing of what each indi­vid­ual finds pleas­ing, taste­ful or appro­pri­ate. That requires insight into what they do, what they find beau­ti­ful, amus­ing or use­ful; what would fit into their home décor, their cook­ing style, etc. Insights like that require con­nec­tion and prox­im­ity — much harder to develop when you live far away, no longer part of some­one’s every­day life.

Joy in Giving

A lot of the gift-giv­ing plea­sure dis­ap­pears when you can’t see peo­ple open your gifts or put them to use… Gift giv­ing at a dis­tance becomes a sym­bolic act, an annual rit­ual or even an abstrac­tion devoid of plea­sure. Just a chore to be done in a rush so there’s time for UPS to deliver the pack­ages in time for the hol­i­days.

This year I’ve decided to bring more plea­sure to the act of giv­ing by doing less shop­ping and more “mak­ing,” such as these three scarves that I’ve knit­ted for friends. (Each scarf is about 12 feet long, with grad­u­ated color schemes and a metal­lic fin­ish to the edges. The color schemes suit my friends’ per­sonal pref­er­ences, their will­ing­ness to make a bold state­ment in their fash­ion sen­si­bil­ity.)

Per­haps it’s my yoga prac­tice but I find that the gift of time, made tan­gi­ble in hand­crafted items that take at least a few days to cre­ate, is espe­cially pre­cious…

Joy in Re-gifting

My hus­band and I have also decided to begin “re-gift­ing” — pass­ing on items that he has inher­ited from his fam­ily to the next gen­er­a­tion. We have a small but pre­cious (mem­ory-filled) set of antiques. Why wait until we down­size (or worse yet, die) before giv­ing these items to fam­ily mem­bers? We’re now debat­ing what to give to whom, and over what period of time.

While Obama, Wall Street and econ­o­mists will decry our behav­ior as insuf­fi­ciently con­sumerist — we’re not boost­ing the econ­omy by giv­ing our money to mer­chants — this approach is much more sat­is­fy­ing to us as givers. And hope­fully to the recip­i­ents as well.

Yes, we have pur­chased some gifts, but mostly from arti­sans, crafts­peo­ple or small busi­ness own­ers where our money means a lot more than if we were spend­ing our dol­lars at mega-mer­chants like Ama­zon. Even though we buy many things from Ama­zon through the year, mak­ing hand­made items or shar­ing fam­ily trea­sures feels much more true to the Christ­mas spirit.