With gifts, I think it’s best not to see the recipient’s reaction.

I love making or buying things that I think are interesting, beautiful, or useful. I love imagining how my friend or family member will feel, how they will be reminded that I love them. This part of gifting is pure pleasure. But then you have to actually give the gift, and things get tricky.

If you’re not there, they don’t have to pretend a certain reaction.

If you’re not there, you don’t have to watch them pretend.

And then you don’t have pretend that you don’t notice how underwhelmed they are.

You won’t have your joy in the act of giving marred by the other’s underwhelming reaction, which can turn your own pleasure sour, if you let it.

Such a ricochet of emotion, like ripples outward from a stone dropped in a duck pond, is generated by the giving of a gift. And that’s without even touching on that sticky web of obligation and guilt that we’ve either spun or been trapped within, those pressures dictating that gifts of certain kinds and values be given at certain times to certain people.

Love, itself, can be passed more directly, without the symbolic intermediary of a box of fake-strawberry-scented bath oils found at the end of the aisle during the weekly grocery shop.

A hug. A card that says I love you. A wide smile. A whole evening spent together is a gift much more generous than than something cellophane wrapped.

But, then again, I do really like chocolates…