Offering a Gift

I am still absorbed in my book about Louisa May Alcott. (It takes me a terribly long time to read a book through these days since books are mostly reserved to a few minutes before I go to sleep at night.) Louisa seems to have been rather fixated on presents. She is quite generous with her immediate family as her fortunes improve thanks to her writing but on the flip side she receives very few presents on those gift giving occasions. She deeply appreciates the gifts that she gets but there is clear envy of others who receive more.

It is May, therefore I am almost tardy in finding a gift for my brother’s birthday. He would be fine with a card, I am certain. But I like the ritual of gift giving. The lead up to gift giving occasions means an opportunity to think about that person. To set aside the constant scroll of things to do and places to be for a bit to think about that person. Times we have shared and our current relationship. What the person might like or need.

My brother and I are at that stage in life when we don’t need more things to clutter our homes, but we have lots of interests so a well thought out addition to our collections is appreciated. A couple of years ago, for his birthday, I bought a flash drive and loaded it with the family pictures that I have scanned so far. He was thrilled.

Nine years ago, only months after Mom died, I was doing my ‘oops May has started, gotta birthday shop NOW’ thing and ended up finding my current house. We were living in a townhouse at the time, the boys and I. A townhouse is cozy, but two teenaged boys make it claustrophobic and so we had been unsuccessfully seeking a small single family home. On the way to the mall with my younger son we saw an Open House sign and decided to check it out. It was a ranch just like we had wanted. We went in and it met all our criteria. We were getting excited (and nervous, there were other people touring the house too). Of course I had forgotten my cell phone so we drove home and called our realtor to set up a second tour which would include my older son. I feel like my family helped us to find this house and I got a great gift for my brother’s birthday that year. (I think I got him something from Brookstone…)

Despite the fact that I really enjoy gift shopping for the opportunity to reflect that it provides, regular obligations still take up too much of my thoughts and I find myself scrambling at the last minute quite often. I guess I should work on my planning ahead skills a bit.