Give the wrong gift and you are in danger of someone ungraciously dismissing your thought as trite.
Right now there is a husband or significant other who is suffering because he didn't get his honey a gift that proves his love.
I used to be guilty of this holiday torture.
I remember one Christmas my husband (who was my fiance then) gave me a number of exercise outfits. He thought the items were the perfect presents because I had joined a gym and had been talking about getting some new workout clothes.
In my mind, however, the gifts showed he thought I was fat. I wept right there in front of him.
It pains me all these years later that I made him sad because he didn't choose what I thought was the right gift.
The fact is, we put too much weight on whether the gift illustrates whether someone loves us or knows us well enough to get just the right thing.
Recently I asked readers to give their thoughts on the practice of re-gifting. In the midst of griping about re-gifts they'd received, I realized how perverse are many people's expectations of what a present should be.
One woman wrote: "My mom is a re-gifter. About three years ago, my sister and I decided that we would discourage any gift-giving from her. We open the boxes in her presence, and if it's something we detest or recognize, we leave it with her and it does not come home."
How rude. Handing a present back to someone in disgust is the act of an ingrate.
