Christmas Presents

I feel it should be illegal to hafta buy a Christmas present for someone who makes more money than you. Camon.-  XMASTIME

"At the toy store, miserable.  Can't I just cut the kid a fucking check?" - Watty

Matt Yglesias over at Slate pines for a day when instead of buying potentially risky gifts, ie shit nobody wants, we can all just give each other cash:

The indisputable fact is that cash is the most economically efficient gift. But cash is, in many cases, socially unacceptable, which means you need to pursue an alternative approach. Here your best bet is to show a taste for risk. The problem with presents is that you’re never going to do a better job of satisfying the gift-recipient’s preferences than she could do herself. When you step outside the circle of things you know for sure your gift-getter likes, you risk creating a massive deadweight loss. (You give her a ticket to Las Vegas, without knowing that she hates gambling.) But with the greater risk comes a greater potential reward. You may introduce the recipient to something marvelous she would otherwise have never encountered. Giving stuff rather than cash is a way of saying you know better than the recipient what she really wants. The riskier the present, the more likely it is to generate significant benefit.

When you give a really great gift, it's a really great feeling.  When you give a shitty one, it's a shitty feeling, of which I am the goddam king:

On a side note, the greatest Christmas gift I ever gave someone was dirt from Faulkner's grave. Well, actually I can't say it was the "greatest" gift. Matter of fact, he hated it, and still brings it up today and what a shitty friend it makes me. So.

Tho it was better than the gift I gave him for Christmas '94: an It's a Wonderful Life calendar...for 1994.

There's "make sure you give me the receipt so I can exchange it at Home Depot for what I actually fucking need" people, and there's "oh, I've never seen this, what a potential find!" people.  And then there's "so and so gave me this so I'll cherish it forever" people; ie queers like me.