On gifting
Jun. 9th, 2006 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherynscaleAs it turns out, Fathers' Day is next week. While this does not incur the level of challenge and or anxiety of say, Winter Avarice, it does present some issues. And it's complicated. You see, I'm a magician more or less by nature as well as by practice. I have a long memory for trivia and a tendency to view everything as not only the thing itself, but also as a symbol of other things. As such, giving good gifts is one of the talents I've developed and one of the standards of behavior I expect myself to meet. A good gift is, IMHO, appropriate, wanted, relevant to the trivia of a recipient's life, not a repeat of past gifts, and also a conveyor of the right symbolic message and resonance.
For example, some of you may know that I rarely give flowers to people, except to my mother. This is because in my understanding, flowers are not a gift, they are an offering. The gift of flowers is conveys that it is not possible for the giver to give the recipient anything that the recipient would actually need or doesn't already have. The recipient is fully capable of fulfilling all of their own needs and wants, and anything the giver could give would be superfluous and pale beside what the recipient can already provide for themselves. In addition, the giving of flowers is a very temporary thing -- it conveys that the giver is so devoted to the recipient that they would sacrifice their time and resources to give something ephemeral which must constantly be replaced. There is no material value to a gift of flowers, but the symbolic value is excessive. This gift also says, traditionally, that the giver hopes the recipient will forgive the giver their wrongdoings and so on, and so forth. All of the relationships referenced by a gift of flowers seem better suited to a gift to a deity than to a gift to a person. But I envision that this is how my mother would prefer to be viewed, so come Mothers' Day, I hold my nose and send flowers.
Fathers' Day, though, is a bit different. Or at least, my dad is a bit different. He is a man of few interests, and what interests he has, I have already addressed with previous gifts. For a while, he collected waffle irons, and this made the gifting process much easier. At some point, though, mom convinced him that this was stupid, so he stopped. So I'm thinking about taking the offering approach with him as well -- perhaps I'll send him some steaks. It's not quite the same message content as flowers, but it's related, I think.
On a note completely unrelated to my relatives, but related to gifting, I understand that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ysabel offered to give me sex toys for my birthday. This amuses me to no end, but there's something in the most socialized/southern part of my being that goes, "Er." And that, while still being pretty ignorable, makes me curious. So I'm asking you, Vast and Unpaid Research Department, have you ever given or received sex toys as a gift? Under what circumstances? When, in your opinion, would that sort of thing make a good gift?
For example, some of you may know that I rarely give flowers to people, except to my mother. This is because in my understanding, flowers are not a gift, they are an offering. The gift of flowers is conveys that it is not possible for the giver to give the recipient anything that the recipient would actually need or doesn't already have. The recipient is fully capable of fulfilling all of their own needs and wants, and anything the giver could give would be superfluous and pale beside what the recipient can already provide for themselves. In addition, the giving of flowers is a very temporary thing -- it conveys that the giver is so devoted to the recipient that they would sacrifice their time and resources to give something ephemeral which must constantly be replaced. There is no material value to a gift of flowers, but the symbolic value is excessive. This gift also says, traditionally, that the giver hopes the recipient will forgive the giver their wrongdoings and so on, and so forth. All of the relationships referenced by a gift of flowers seem better suited to a gift to a deity than to a gift to a person. But I envision that this is how my mother would prefer to be viewed, so come Mothers' Day, I hold my nose and send flowers.
Fathers' Day, though, is a bit different. Or at least, my dad is a bit different. He is a man of few interests, and what interests he has, I have already addressed with previous gifts. For a while, he collected waffle irons, and this made the gifting process much easier. At some point, though, mom convinced him that this was stupid, so he stopped. So I'm thinking about taking the offering approach with him as well -- perhaps I'll send him some steaks. It's not quite the same message content as flowers, but it's related, I think.
On a note completely unrelated to my relatives, but related to gifting, I understand that
ysabel offered to give me sex toys for my birthday. This amuses me to no end, but there's something in the most socialized/southern part of my being that goes, "Er." And that, while still being pretty ignorable, makes me curious. So I'm asking you, Vast and Unpaid Research Department, have you ever given or received sex toys as a gift? Under what circumstances? When, in your opinion, would that sort of thing make a good gift?