An Ungifter's Guide to Black Friday

Before you haul yourself to the shopping mall for the American ritual known as Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving, when retail merchants leap out of the red ink and into the black), consider giving yourself a little holiday gift. Don't go.


I'm not saying that just because of the recession. Or because in 1989 I ventured on to the Houston freeway system on the day after Thanksgiving and developed a traffic phobia that persists to this day.

Gifts can hurt.

After my brother, sister and I had all grown up and left home, my father would give my sister and me $25 checks, but he would give my brother a $25 savings bond that matured many years hence. Dad believed us girls were responsible with money, but my brother not so much.

My brother grew to hate those bonds. He complained to my mother, and ultimately she interceded and had a talk with my dad. She said that every time my brother gets a gift, he feels "like you're lecturing him."

"Well, I am!" my father replied.

For a while my dad veered away from cash (or bonds) and purchased the oddest small appliances. He'd buy five or six and give the same thing to everyone. One year it was a steam machine for "pressing" clothes. I'm not sure my uber-casual brother was any happier with that.

Even my sweet, sensitive mother bombed every now and then. One year she bought coasters, which would be fine to give him today. But when my brother was a young college student (who once famously brought a box of Cap'n Crunch to a potluck), the maple-leaf-adorned coasters made him feel like she didn't even know him.

Such is gifting in the real world.

My colleague Delia Lloyd points out that all this gifting is not only "wildly inefficient" because of the huge gap between how much is spent versus how much the gift is valued by the recipient, but it's also passe.

I don't think the ubiquitous gift cards help. I considered purchasing one on the occasion of a bat mitzvah. I checked with the mom to see which stores her daughter liked. But once I talked to the store managers, I deep-sixed my gift-card plan. Just as I suspected, the cards all had expiration dates. What a bonanza for corporations, which, no doubt, count on people being too busy or forgetful to use the card in time.

So I gave the girl cash. And then donated an equal amount to an animal shelter in her name.

I've seen some people eschew gifts entirely in favor of donations to charities, but if I did that, it would feel like I was reducing my own out-of-pocket cost of donating at the expense of friends and relatives.

Cash may be the most expedient present, but I admit it's a poor substitute to finding just the right thing for someone you love. Thanks to the Internet we have so many options besides adding more unwanted junk to the world.

We can research local museums and gardens and buy gift memberships that would suit the tastes and interests of loved ones.

We have Etsy, which showcases handcrafted items, including many that are eco-friendly. Deva Lifewear offers clothing sewn by regular people "in living rooms, spare bedrooms, basements and garages all over the rural areas of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia."

Novica, an online store affiliated with National Geographic, writes that they strive to unite the public with "2,000 extraordinary master artists around the world. Read about their lives, explore their fascinating cultures, and select from more than 15,000 handcrafted works of art."

To get into the holiday spirit, why not throw a white elephant party? Everyone brings a wrapped gift, and people select one at random. It was at just such a party that I had the best laugh of the last 15 years when a friend unwrapped a large (3-by-5-foot ) flat gift. Which turned out to be a framed print of The Blue Boy by Gainsborough.

It took five minutes for the room to calm down and move on to the next present.

Nothing like a giant Blue Boy print to drive home how much unwanted clutter there is in the world. So much, in fact, that it's spawned an industry. Now you can hire a professional to help you de-clutter.

These days I call or send holiday cards, but I usually tell friends and family they'll get a package someday when I find the right gift. I always do, eventually. But unless your intended recipient is the hint-dropping type, the gift has to find you.

One day, out of the blue, I got a package from my sister. It was a book, an old one she'd found secondhand.

The drawings were crude and the story, set in an Italian village, was weird and dreary. There was a poor tailor, a little boy, a puppy that fit into a pocket, a little girl who carried a doll with a stump instead of a head. The puppy ran away, villagers mistook him for a wolf and ran around with pitchforks. But all ends well – the puppy comes home and the girl gets a new doll.

Why in the world I begged my mother to bring home "Pantaloni" from the library every single time she went, I couldn't say. Naturally, my mother got sick of the book, and she tried to diversify. To no avail.

I'd remembered the title of the book, but little else. When I opened my sister's gift, each page drew me further back into a time when I was very young. And very happy. It was a gift for the ages. And not the sort of thing you'll find at the mall.