December 19, 2008
Friday

Officer Frank Smith: What did you get Anne?
Sergeant Joe Friday: Staitonery set, some paper and envelopes, leather binding.
Smith: Joe, you’ll never learn . . . . No woman wants a stationery set. Get her something personal.
Friday: Well, it’s got her initials on it.
                  — dialogue from “The Big Little Jesus,” Episode 17, Season 3 of Dragnet
                      first aired on December 24, 1953

In a recent Press of Atlantic City article about choosing the perfect gift for the perfect person, marriage therapist Rachel Sussman observed that “Christmas can be a real barometer to see what direction your relationship is headed.” She would probably think that Officer Frank Smith was right. Women generally do not find stationery sets and kitchen items romantic, even if they have their initials on them. In the case of kitchen items, that might be especially if that blender or vegetable peeler has their intials on it.

My gift shopping is complete for this year. Ron and I have never predicated the success of our relationship on what shows up under the tree at Christmas. I maintain that the only thing I really want from anybody is a love letter. Ron has not exactly produced the perfect one of those, despite Lynn’s giving him a pad of clever sticky notes with love letter sentence stems. He tends to follow the printed “I love you because . . .” with the product number of the printer cartridge he wants me to pick up the next time I go out to Staples. He has given me some real winners, in particular the GPS in 2006 after he had to read the MapQuest directions to me over my phone one dark night when I was driving around in southern Lancaster county unable to find the New Holland Mennonite Church. I am grateful for it every single time I use it, and I love the symbolism of his having gotten me something to ensure that I won’t get lost.

And I will confess right this minute that I haven’t gotten anything for Ron this year. I did most of my shopping at the women artisans’ marketplace that I stumbled upon at the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington at the beginning of the month, and at their gift shop and the one at the Folger Shakespeare Library. That stuff is inherently girly and more suitable for Lynn and some of my women friends (for example, a magnet with a thought about cats from The Merchant of Venice). Ron is more difficult to find a gift for. He doesn’t even want a love letter.

The De Beers Family of Companies, a conglomerate which sells chiefly diamond jewelry, has been running an ad which attempts to focus on the idea that most of the gifts we give and get are useless, designed to fill a moment. “If everything you ever bought her diasppeared overnight, what would she truly miss?” they ask. You can probably guess what they hope will be the answer.

As Rachel Sussman suggests, the right gift can strengthen a bond, the wrong one can cause the crack that shatters it. I was married to someone else for seven years before I married Ron.

When we’d been married two years, my first husband gave me a battery-operated kitchen clock that ticked. It had a pendulum and was in a box that was decorated with hand-painted vegetables and (this is painful to remember) a rooster. Vegetable or other food-themed wallpaper is not allowed NEAR my kitchen. I cannot BEAR a ticking clock. And there already was a clock in the stove, one that didn’t tick. I tried (sort of) to tolerate the gift clock for a day or so. He said he’d see if he could disable the pendulum. He took it down to the basement, where it languished for a while, and eventually it disappeared.

The next Christmas I actually asked for a microwave oven, but he said he was opposed to having “gadgets” that just made things “easy.” After thirty years I have just now tonight made the possible connection between my rejection of the clock and his opposition to the microwave. Instead, he got me a rose that was fashioned out of very thin slices of wood glued onto a thick wire that was wrapped in green florist’s tape and had cloth leaves sticking out of it. The wood petals were shaped by steam and dyed all the same color, and the leaves had a blob of glue meant to look like a bead of moisture. The whole thing was infused with a strong artificial rose perfume. I thought these things were hideous, but I knew he liked them. He bought it at the 7-11 on Progress Avenue, where he stopped every day for coffee, and where his future second wife was working. I got one of those roses for every birthday and Christmas that we had left together.

Writing this piece has made me more anxious about my gifting this year. I’ve gotten a panoply of things for Lynn, some assorted small things found on my literary gallivants that bring one or another of my closest friends to mind, something for my sister that represents a unique piece of our shared history. But I don’t have anything, not any one new thing, for Ron.

But I’ll tell you, I can give an answer to the De Beers question, “If everything you ever bought her disappeared overnight, what would she truly miss?”

None of it. Not one single thing. The memories of the push and pull, the give and take, the ups and downs of twenty-five years together, the joy that being the wife and mother in this family has brought me, can never be taken away from me.

*********

A year ago, I wrote about a picture of Lynn I could submit to Scared of Santa.

Two years ago, I included an excerpt from my Christmas memoir about a gift-opening session that ended in tears.

Three years ago, I summarized my first trip to Wyoming.

Four years ago, I wrote about my party.

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