Like all gifts, the gift of giving is as much for the giver as for the receiver. This paradox is especially true of homemade gifts. The modern tradition of purchasing pre-made gifts arises from our tendency to want to really give something to the receiver. Interacting through the medium of money, however, severs the giver, in a way, from the gift, and emphasizes the unidirectionality of flow, downplaying the interpersonal nature of giving. When you give something you’ve made, the act of giving retains a strong reciprocity. The receiver still “gets” something, but in that reception, “gives” something back as well.
Our ability to make this statement, whatever language we say it in—words, art, food, music, sculpture, gardening, bodywork, et cetera—is, I believe, essential to our well-being-together on this planet. Giving, and especially giving of oneself, directly of one’s time and energy, as in the homemade gift, is an act that joins the giver and the receiver together in a greater collective project of giving; ourselves to life and to the world. In giving and in receiving gifts, we accept our indebtedness to the matrix, whose provision of a surplus of resources—time, food, materials, money—makes holidays, respite from the work of survival, time and space to reflect and give thanks, possible in the first place.
Even gifts purchased with money though, cannot but eventually recapitulate this primordial law. Money is nothing but a codified proxy for this original gift of peaceful, plentiful subsistence and survival. In taking this gift of life for granted, although we invert the structures of our local ecological networks, we can only, ultimately ever do so locally, illusorily. Still, this does ourselves and our planet a disservice.
So hear ye merry Revelers. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Let us not blame one another for being stuck on our hamster-wheel roller-coasters of profit-maximizing exhilaration/misery. Blame (if, and when, indeed we must place blame) the blindness of the machinery that drives those wheels, and the assumption that the behind and the in front—the public and the private, the collective and the individual—are indeed “separate” entities, divisible and controllable with tools like language and money and stuff.
Failing to appreciate this subtle (un)truth is not evil. It is sad. The extent to which our culture continues in failing to recognize the essential reciprocity of giving is precisely the extent to which it must eventually succumb, relinquishing its/our identity to the inevitable flux of being, the inescapable current of transformation and change which underlies and supports, like the dark ocean beneath a small boat, all that we imagine to be fixed and permanent. Were it not for the crisis threatening to overwhelm our tiny vessel, would we be able to appreciate the revealed structure(lessness) of this awesome reality? Is this glimpse into the mysterious workings of life and fate not itself a marvelous elfin contraption of the finest quality?
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Blake Seidenshaw is currently undertaking an accelerated study of language and its structures at Fordham University, for whom he has been organizing a conference series on the subject of interdisciplinary research and scholarship (interdisciplined.com). He is an authorized teacher and practitioner of ashtanga yoga, a musician, a husband, a brother and a son to various special others.
Onalistus Reveler
Ernistine Cabins
Myra Eddy
House Manager
Daisy Jane Danger
Blujay
Cody Meyocks
making homemade gifts is a lot of fun, and it surely contributes to paring down one’s obligatory gift list. i probably wouldn’t celebrate presentmas, except that i have a kid. but still, we try to put the authentic back into our celebration as much as we can–even though neither of us are christian!
It interests me to see the stress and hardship of this time of year for many people, especially since most of it is self-imposed. We work and work the year away, and then the holidays come and we work longer and harder in order to… enjoy ourselves? That makes no sense to me. In my opinion buying “gifts” defeats the entire purpose of taking a holiday. We spend the entire rest of the year buying things. Time to take a break no?
This year for our first New Old Yule Celebration we’re giving the gift of “good tidings.” We’ve each been given a random Reveler to learn about, and then send them into the night with a note honoring their best qualities.
Everyone gets a gift. No one spends any dough. And still kinda fun.
Will post on this after Dec 18th.
yeah.. but lets be honest too; we all still buy stuff, all the time. We buy food, pay for shelter, pay for entertainment and education; we’re talking about an omniextensive system here, a common medium we use collectively, for communications of all these kinds… giving gifts, in my opinion, is one of the finest uses to which we can put this medium (i.e.$$); who doesn’t appreciate being given money? I bet even the richest folks crack smiles when their nanas send them a holiday card with a 20 tucked inside ; ) This thing cuts both ways, is what I’m saying; giving -precisely in the $ medium- is a way for us to twist the machine around to operate on itself. We turn it (back) to our own purposes, like making happiness, and building community, forging cooperative relationships, etc.
~just to complicate these notions a bit…
I love giving people presents and in particular I like making presents, but sometimes buying someone something you know they’ll like as opposed to making them something that, while you enjoyed making it for them, they might not actually get anything out of, is the better thing to do.
I think a present you paid for can be just as special as a present you made yourself, but it should be something that’s special, something that the other person actually wants, not just a present for the sake of buying a present. I think the point of either making or buying a present for someone, whenever you’re doing it, should be to show how well you know that person and what their interests are, not just to try and prove that since you bought them something (or made them something), that automatically means you care about them.
I wonder if there are ways within the “profit-maximizing matrix” of our time to practice meaningful gift-giving (this seems to be the ilk of many of the comments here.) I hope so, as the matrix isn’t going to be busted anytime soon.
For me it comes down to thinking about those to whom I *want* to give–and stepping into these gifts wholly, rather than into the gifts I “should” dole out. We live in a culture of empty, obligatory gifts: to officemates, to family members we don’t totally appreciate, to friends or acquaintances who have given us something in a less than wholehearted way. As there is a profit-making matrix, there’s an empty gift-giving matrix appended to it. A shadow and rot in what’s “polite.”
I feel like I get closer to true gift-giving when I head this way: cutting out the chaff, embracing some rude self, giving only when I can fully get inside the giving.
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