All my Christmas gift buying is done. We celebrated a combined Thanksgiving and Christmas with our younger son and his family last week. Gifts for our older son and his daughter will travel with us to Arizona soon. Anyone who knows me well, understands how much I hate gift-buying this time of year. Everyone in the family has more than they need. Finding a gift becomes an exercise of obligation and excess—both of which exasperate me. I know grandparents who have solved the dilemma by gifting an experience—tickets to a play or sports event that can be shared, for example. But, for multiple reasons, that doesn’t work in my family. We still give things and the task gets harder each year.
I also hate getting gifts for the same reason. I have everything I need. The kids insist on a list and I wrack my brain to come up with suggestions. I remember when my mother-in-law was in her 80s. Although she had always been a borderline hoarder, she finally reached a stage where she decided she too had too much. She asked for postage stamps so she could write to friends. She didn’t want stationery or fancy notecards. She had plenty of those. She just wanted stamps. We found most of those unused in a drawer when she died.
Every year I tell the kids what I really want is time with them. I’m not looking to share an event or an activity, just hanging-out time together. Focused time is rare these days. I think back to holidays with my mom and mother-in-law when they were the age that I am now. I wonder if I gave them what they really needed. Did I ask them what was new or did I assume that nothing was? Did I ask what they were thinking or feeling? Did I reminisce with them? We shared some wonderful times together that would have been fun to remember. Did I listen, show interest, give enough hugs?
I want what we all want at any age—to be seen and heard by the people we love. That gift becomes more precious as we get older and harder to ask for without sounding whiny. Life is so short. Time passes too quickly.
I read a beautiful quote on friendship yesterday by the poet David Whyte. He said, “the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
Yep, that. That’s what I want for Christmas again this year.
Crows Feet Chronicles 