'Tis The Season For Giving, Receiving

Story by Dan Nguyen 

| Published Dec 15, 2009

Mmmmm. The holidays are here — many people’s favorite time of the year. Of the many reasons to be happy this wintery season, receiving gifts ranks among the top.

When you really think about it, there are only a few occasions within the year that we receive worthwhile gifts — our birthdays, maybe, or possibly at wedding and baby showers. But that’s all at the expense of some pretty depressing matters: aging, marriage, babies. Eh!

Yet, around the holidays, we receive gifts just for the sake of receiving gifts. Well, I guess there is that whole religious aspect, but who really thinks about that these days?

The reason for giving gifts isn't as important as the fact that, for once, we get a good gift. The cheer and joy that comes from these gifts is not derived from materialism, but from the comfort of knowing that someone spent the time and effort out of his or her own day to think about you.

Yet, what we might not realize is that every day, not just during the holiday month, we are the recipients of gifts. We just don’t perceive them as gifts because these gifts — these gifts are just real shitty.

Shitty like the gift I got deejaying at a greek formal: “I just took a couple minutes thinking of how you could get this place really going. You should play a song that is catchy, recognizable and something people can dance to.”

Shitty like the gift of someone telling me what they think of my column: “This trash is better suited for someone's desperate, lonely LiveJournal than an otherwise-respectable knockoff of the Onion. Dan, you are not a good writer. Give up the dream.”

Unfortunately the definition of these shitty gifts is extremely vague. There is no real material matter to these gifts.

In fact, the only reason these gifts are even considered gifts is because they are specifically intended for someone else to receive. Someone took productive time out of his or her day — time that could have been spent on his or her own life — focused on you. And because of that willingness to give to you, you are the proud recipient of an unwanted gift.

Yet, what I find is that a gift is a gift. And in today’s fast paced modern world, I find that time is a limited resource. Even a shitty gift is still a selfless act, an act that requires time and thought out of someone else’s life.

And what we might not realize is that we also give ourselves gifts everyday. I find that what you do with your own time, time that is spent concerned with yourself, is a gift to yourself. And what you do with that time determines whether you are giving yourself a great gift or a real shitty gift.

So, this holiday break, if you like giving yourself shitty gifts, keep doing things with your time that you hate. If you like rewarding yourself with crap and you hate my articles, read every single one I’ve ever written. Anything to waste your time so that after it’s all said and done nothing productive came from the time you gave yourself.

But if you owe yourself a really good gift, do something you like with your time. Anything you want so that when you’re done you can feel that you got at least some measly sense of enjoyment.

Now excuse me as I go masturbate.

Happy Holidays.