The Spirit of Giving
I'm going to be needing a refresher course.
On Black Friday in 2008, a Walmart worker was trampled to death while opening the store.
From an article in The Guardian: 2,000 people were gathered outside the store doors at the mall about 20 miles east of Manhattan. The impatient crowd knocked the man, Jdimytai Damour, 34, of Queens, to the ground as he opened the doors, leaving a metal portion of the frame crumpled like an accordion.
Now, I cringe when I hear the term “doorbuster sale.” The holiday gift-buying frenzy can bring out a shockingly dark side of human nature.
Of course, when they were young, my kids were short-term thrilled to get a coveted American Girl Doll or X-Box or whatever the it item happened to be, but within hours they were back to playing make-believe with their siblings and friends, which required zero effort or cash outlay on my part and pure inventiveness on theirs.
Still, regarding gift-giving, selfishly, I loved seeing their transparent delight in getting a dumb often expensive thing about which they’d been badgering me for months. My delight was never in the thing itself, but their evident joy and my part in eliciting it. Essentially, it was generosity tinged with power trip.
Over the years, I managed to shed this impulse. My offspring are creative adults and as such, they own their joy and know how to find it, no door-busting necessary on my part. I will be using Venmo.
The new wrinkle is my grandson Henry, nearly one. I am already thinking about how out-of-his mind he’s going to be when I hand him something I know he’ll love, and just how painfully obvious it is that this gift-giving lesson is one I will have to keep relearning.