Gifts are Meant to be Thoughtful

I have a friend who is getting married. A few work pals and I went in on her Dyson vacuum for her wedding present. It's not a particularly personal item, however it was one she had repeatedly told us she was excited about, even to the point of dreaming about it. We got made fun of when it was presented to her but I happen to know she used it that same night. A gift used immediately is a successful gift.

One of her other friends “gifted” her with Cubs tickets. The tickets themselves were offered last minute and prefaced with the statement that the friend had mixed up the dates and wasn’t able to use them herself. Payment was refused when the tickets were picked up by the groom-to-be and the gifting notification came in the form of a text message stating “Happy Wedding”, followed by another text message stating “that was serious”. A gift involving leftovers presented as an after thought is an unsuccessful, sort of insulting gift.

GIFTS ARE MEANT TO BE THOUGHTFUL. You want to give a gift that makes the receiver feel special, not that you didn’t remember their birthday or didn’t take the brief time needed to pick something off their already registered gift list.

The bad news is that giving a gift that’s thoughtful can take time, like when I wanted to send a photo in an engraved frame. After finding the frame that worked I still had to wait 3-4 weeks for it to by shipped. The good news is that being thoughtful isn’t about the price tag. Buying an expensive gift just takes money; finding a gift that will mean something once presented, that will show that person that you took the time to think about what they would enjoy, is what gift giving is all about.

You won’t always have time to think ahead and sometimes you’ll straight out forget. Just because you’re behind the ball on the gift doesn’t mean you can’t redeem yourself on the presentation, though. If you swing by a grocery store to grab a bottle of wine then also grab some curly ribbon to put on the bottle. It's not necessarily a personal gift, but the presentation says you took the time to make it special.

If you’re going through the effort of presenting any gift at all you then you should at least make an effort to make it nice. In the words of L.O. Baird, “May no gift be too small to give, nor too simple to receive, which is wrapped in thoughtfulness, and tied with love.”