Christmas Grinchtacular

I feel weird about gifts.

Hello! Emails are back! I don’t like Substack very much as they’re trying to be a social media platform (plus the whole Nazi thing), but I also have not invented another way to send emails to a loyal following of about three people.

Today, a quick note about Christmas.

I love Christmas. Also: I’ve always felt weird about gifts. I feel very awkward about the expectation placed on receiving a gift. I know I’m supposed to feel excited about receiving something but I mainly feel tremendous guilt if I don’t love it or it doesn’t get used much or at all. It’s just a totem of guilt and shame sitting on the shelf forever.

And I find gift giving hard too. How could I come up with something for another adult who has the money to buy the things that they need and want that they don’t already have? Unless it’s from a provided list, in which case, I am just doing their shopping for them.

Adult-to-child gift giving and child-from-adult gift receiving are fine. This is only about adult-on-adult gifting. I for sure had gift-receiving anxiety as a teen and possibly even younger, but I’ll allow for that to be a me problem.

There has been this weird feeling around the whole process that I haven’t really been able to put words to and assumed it was just a me problem and that I was some sort of Christmas-enjoying Grinch. Except in this case, the Grinch already knew that Christmas was not about the material possessions or gifting. An anti-grinch labelled as a grinch.

Yesterday, the algorithm gods blessed me with a video essay from a couple years ago that gave a lot of form to the feelings I’ve carried with me forever. It’s really good. (I mean, Angela Collier is always good.) It turns out there’s also an economic excuse for my weird guilt!

Some music for you

Here’s a link to one of my fav Christmas albums you may not have heard:

… unless you are Dan. I know you’ve heard that one. Here’s another that I like:

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