I’m a little embarassed to admit this, but I am a gift giving catastrophe. No, I don’t stumble and break the gifts before giving. Whenever it is gift-giving time, it just takes me an extremely long time to move beyond the decision stage. I don’t know why my ideas seem to me to lack any originality or creativity. I’m sure you’ve already figured out the solution to my despair: the Internet.
The Internet is full of the usual and the unusual when it comes to gift suggestions. Of course I know that a lot of the people making suggestions are actually trying to get me to spend my hard earned money. Actually, I don’t even object to that. I figure if someone can help me solve my gift quandry, then they deserve to make a profit from my purchase. In my country, that’s the patriotic way to look at it!
Is there anyplace other than the online world where I might be inspired to send my mom a New York style cheesecake instead of the same boring chocolate cake I usually sent her? Fortunately, I can stretch this one idea out for many years simply by changing the flavor of cheesecake from one birthday to the next.
My sister-in-law has my same decision making problem. She went online and discovered a bracelet idea for her grandmother (on the good side of the family–not mine). It worked out beautifully for her but it raised the bar to a higher standard for me.
There are gift ideas online for various age groups like retired folks or young couples. You can also search using your favorite search engine by looking for gifts for a particular occasion from Christmas to Bar Mitzvahs, birthdays to graduations, or even those holidays when nobody seems to really know the origin, such as Sweetest Day or St. Astor’s day or Siamese kitten day. If you already have the beginnings of an idea, which is already one step ahead of me, you can conduct a search for a product category. You might be inventive enough to know that you want to buy Cousin Martha a scarf, so you can check out which ones are most popular or unique or are the greenest. You might know that you want to buy your neighbor some accessory for his newly restored 1957 Chevy convertible. You can actually search for specific parts for that sort of thing. The possibilities are mind boggling for me.
Indeed, there are entire websites dedicated to people who give gift ideas for gift klutzes like me to steal and claim them as our own. If you happen to be one of those sorts of blessed people with too many ideas to use yourself, please put them online so that I can find them or you could just send the item directly to me and I’ll forward it to my favorite recipient. You can count on my everlasting appreciation.
Tags: gift, gift ideas, gifts, present, present ideas, presents