This time of year is an utter nightmare for me. I hate crowds anyway, I hate shopping anyway and I worry incessantly about “doing the wrong thing” or offending someone. Leigh-Ann made a great point about online shopping, but I’ve waited until too late to do that, not because I procrastinated but because my family can’t seem to decide what we are or aren’t doing about gifts. This year particularly, with a wedding coming up, the last thing I need is to blow a few hundred dollars buying gifts in October, only to learn that we’re not exchanging this year/not exchanging with this or that set of relatives/drawing names/some other variation. So I didn’t get a head start because I was hoping to discover the plan - still don’t know, have conflicting information, but that’s beside the point.

Alan is all about The Gift Card. I’m against the gift card for several reasons, one of which is that the recipient knows exactly how much you spent. I’m not trying to hide it, I’m not going to put a glass vase from Target into a Tiffany box, but The Gift Card makes it very easy to hurt someone’s feelings, I think. “Helly gave me a $15 gift card! I thought we were better friends than that! I spent $50 on her gift!” It’s as bad if The Gift Card is too generous; people feel bad who can’t similarly reciprocate, or the particularly mean-spirited think you’re trying to rub your income in their faces. (Yes, someone accused me of this once.) If I get the amount right or exchange within a group who puts a spending limit on gifts, that makes it rather pointless; if Tori gives me a $50 gift card from Border’s and I give her a $50 gift card from Best Buy, wouldn’t we both have been better off without doing the whole exchange rigamarole, and save ourselves the time and trouble of going to the store and standing in line?

On the other hand, The Gift Card does offer safety from that other Christmas Spectre, the Incongruous Gift. I always get at least one gift that seems so completely “not Helly” that I fight the urge to scrabble around in the wrappings to see if I’ve inadvertently opened someone else’s gift. Why do I, of all people, need an electric coffee-mug warmer or thong underwear? The same reason Cheryl needs a Darth Vader necklace, I guess, or my brother Bo needs geezer pants. Heh - the geezer pants. [This is my brother. Does he LOOK LIKE he'd wear geezer pants? I'm just sayin'.]

Four or five years ago, I was Christmas shopping with my mom who for some unknown reason had fixated upon buying my hip, counter-culture, non-preppy brother some khaki pants. I tried everything I could to dissuade her, even pointing out that he preferred - and had stated a need for - jeans of a brand sold at Old Navy, which was right down the street. She kept pulling out khaki pants for my inspection, but that wasn’t the worst part. They weren’t khaki Docker-style pants, they were geezer pants, the polyester kind with a flat clip thingy at the waist instead of buttons. She selected pair after pair of geezer pants in various shades of khaki, some with belt loops, some without (yes, polyester geezer pants without belt loops - the horror), some with those sewn-shut faux pockets, getting progressively madder and madder at me when I answered “no” every time she asked, “Do you think he’ll like these?”

Finally, in exasperation she shoved the hangar back onto the rack and said, “Well, what DO you think he’ll like?” and I answered, “I dunno, not geezer pants from Wal-Mart.” She was sooo pissed at me. She didn’t buy the geezer pants, though. Unfortunately, at some later shopping expedition outside my jurisdiction, she bought Bo this horrible burgundy and grey striped geezer sweater - you know those thin sweaters made of some odd material that feels vaguely greasy? One of them. So although I saved my baby brother from the geezer pants, I couldn't protect him from the bag-lady sweater. Don’t even try to deny, ameliorate or otherwise deflect this in the comments, Mom. You know it’s true.