Disordered.

 

Earlier this month, a meme made the rounds which I remember seeing for the first time last year:

I am the person on the right.

+ + +

I spent many years frankly telling my friends, "I hate Christmas."   I didn't mention this sentiment much to my immediate or extended family (most of whom are represented by the person on the left in the aforementioned meme).   Nevertheless, I was open about it to just about everyone else.   

The whole shebang represented Season of Pressure to me.  If something reminded me of Christmas in, say, May, I would feel a pit in my stomach followed by a quick calculation and then the cold sensation of relief that many months yet remained.   If I thought about it in mid-October, the same would be followed by a sense of looming dread.  

I never quite understood the reasons, although I had my theories.   Part of it may be the introvert-raised-by-extroverts thing.  Childhood Christmases were exhausting:  up before light to exclaim over presents at my mother's house, then on to my grandmother's house for a few hours, then to my other grandmother's house, or possibly an aunt.  Somewhere, the handoff, from my mother's family to my father's family, as was no doubt cordially agreed-upon outside my hearing.  Perhaps a stop to see a friend of my father and stepmother.  Finally, an hour's drive farther, and opening more presents long after dark.  Collapsing into bed on the foldout couch, tired and a little sick from too many cookies.

Christmas presents worried me even as a child.  Would I be convincing enough when I opened the paper and smiled and said Thank You?  I never felt that I could manage to be enthusiastic enough.  It may have been all in my head, but to me it always seemed that I disappointed people -- I didn't rip the paper off fast enough, I didn't squeal loudly enough.  "You're no fun," I would hear.  "Why don't you get excited?"  I am excited -- and tired, is what I would like to go back in time to say.   That wasn't really okay though.  

And then there was the terrible situation (again, probably created in my own head) where I felt traitorous to be too excited about my father's gifts in front of my mother, or about my mother's gifts in front of my father.  I'm not sure that either of them ever were anything other than neutral about presents in front of me.  But somewhere deep down I was certain that to be too enthusiastic about one's gifts in front of the other would be met with hurt feelings (in one case) or mockery (in the other).  

Don't even get me started on the year of the Cabbage Patch Doll shortage.

Growing up did not make me any less  worried about Christmas presents.  I never knew what to get people.  Money wasn't a problem for us, except that the knowledge of it seemed to make its own problem.  

I didn't want Christmas to be all about gift-giving, and I didn't want my kids to be centered around presents; but I couldn't very well tell people who meant well and wanted to be generous and had few opportunities to do so, not to spend money on my children.

I worried that if I spent too much money on other people, I would be encouraging the gift-giving to spiral out of control, and buying into a materialistic interpretation of the season, and possibly that people would think I was showing off.  

I worried that if I spent too little money people would think I was stingy.  

I worried that if I bought something that a cousin or aunt disliked, that they would think I didn't care enough about them to find out what they wanted.  

I worried that if I gave people a list of things I would be happy to receive, that they would think I was being demanding.  I didn't want to ask for a list from other people because then they would want a list from me.  

I fretted and fretted even about the totally low-pressure $25 random buy-a-gift-for-a-person-of-your-gender, pick-a-number-from-a-hat exchange that my husband's family does every year.  Nobody ever seemed happy with the thing that I would buy (even though it was the kind of thing I would have liked).   I dreaded every year when mine would be the last gift picked.  

The only people I enjoyed buying gifts for were children.  Still are.

+ + +

I never hated Christian Christmas:  Advent and St. Nicholas and midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and Epiphany.  When that all came into my life the first year I lived away from home, it was like a brisk wind swirling snowflakes into a stuffy, hot room.  It gave me a brief hope that Christmas could be different.  Maybe I could adopt a new identity as A Person Who Takes The Christmas Season Seriously.  (After all, I was clearly no good at having fun with it.)  I found real peace before the manger.   Because of that, I tried to form my nuclear family into a Family Who Only Does Small Meaningful Gifts.  

Well, that would perhaps work if I stayed in Minnesota for Christmas (which I managed to do a few times by having two winter babies and one bout of stomach flu).   But because we are not an island unto ourselves, of course, it didn't work.  I tried saying "Let's not do presents; I'm just going to give money to such-and-such a scholarship fund, and you do the same for me."  Relatives would agree, and so I would do that and not buy a present, then they would go and donate to the scholarship fund AND buy me a present.  "I just wanted you to have something to unwrap."  Sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach.  

All this anxiety touched everything about Christmas.  I had become, from an early age, a bona fide Grinch.  The whole thing:  cards, decorations, cookie-making.  I just -- I just hated it.  I procrastinated on EVERYTHING.  It all made me feel depressed and -- like I had many other things that I was required to do, on top of all the many things there are to do every day anyway.   I imagined that the rest of the world could somehow do all of it at once:  perhaps I lacked the enzyme that is crucial to extract energy and motivation from the scent of gingerbread and from peppermint-flavored lattes.   I would be paralyzed almost every year.  

I might, in mid-November, have a surge of hope and buy a box of Christmas cards and a couple of envelopes of stamps.  They would sit unopened on my counter all through December, because I kept thinking that I could not send one of them unless I sent all of them, because it would somehow be unfair.  As if a friend from high school and a great-aunt were going to compare notes and say, "What?!  She sent you one and she didn't send me one?" Apparently I would rather be the kind of person who just doesn't send cards, than navigate the minefield of prioritizing whom to send them to.

It's the thought that counts, right?  

Well -- deep down, I just never have been able to believe that any of my thoughts count.

+ + +

It was really only this year that I sat down and really considered what was going on with all this Christmas-related anxiety.  I tried to imagine what a good Christmas would be like.  

It's easy to point to my favorite Christmas.   Back in 2009, we stayed in Minneapolis because I was eight months pregnant with my fourth child.  We went to our friends' house on Christmas Eve and shared cookies and played games all evening by the lights of the Christmas tree. "If we leave here soon, we can make it to Midnight Mass and not have to go in the morning," Mark pointed out.  That sounded great, and so we gathered up our tired children and went to our own parish for the first time ever.  The children fell asleep in our laps at Mass to the sound of Christmas carols.  We took them home just as the snow was beginning to fall, and put them to bed.  Next morning it was still snowing, and it snowed all day (21 inches!) The children slept in a good long while while we drank our coffee together.  We had cinnamon rolls for breakfast and chili from the crockpot later, and Mark and the children built an igloo in the back yard.  

Even though that was a beautiful Christmas, it turned out, I missed seeing friends I usually see at Christmas.  I missed Christmas lunch at my grandma's house.  I missed my extended family, actually, but didn't miss the presents.

So just this year I figured out:

I don't hate Christmas.  I actually love many, many things about it.  It's just the Christmas presents.  I can't deal with them, and I have so many anxieties wrapped up in them that I have  trouble relaxing and enjoying all the other things.  Without presents there would be food, and friends, and catching up with family members I don't see often, and cookies, and music, and singing, and the Holy Child in the manger, and joy. All things I really and truly love, and wish I could just enjoy.

I just... get really, completely irrationally, stressed out about Christmas presents.  Giving them AND getting them. It's nobody's fault, I think.  I'm just weird that way.

+ + +

There are probably people who can't really relax and enjoy the holidays because, even though many wonderful things happen, they know they will have to deal with being around alcohol, and they can't really handle it, and it's stressful.

There are definitely people who dread the holidays because of fear that they will lose control of themselves around all the copious cookies and mashed potatoes and pie and candy.  Or maybe that they will have an allergic reaction because Aunt Betty forgot to tell them she put pecans in the snickerdoodles.

Me?  I, apparently, have a gifting disorder. 

If I frame it that way, at least to myself, I think I can start groping back to a place where I can admit to myself that Christmas isn't so bad, overall.  

+ + +

Over the years I have developed a few coping mechanisms.  

One of them is to accept that my husband will make the Christmas shopping decisions for most people (something that often happened anyway as I covered my ears and went FALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU every time he broached the subject.)

For the handful of people whose presents I still had to buy myself:  I got over the notion that a gift had to be carefully picked out to express the nuances of my relationship with each person, and have defaulted to:   JUST BUY PEOPLE LIQUOR AND/OR CHOCOLATE.  This rule has served me pretty well as almost everyone seems to be happy with one or the other, if not both.

(In the case of the girl-gift-exchange, I finally just started buying chocolate liquor.  I might not go for it myself, but it's clearly an acceptable random gift between females of the species.  And if we wind up with a bottle of it at the end, Mark will blend it into chocolate malts.)

I also helped ease the oscillating-on-the-spectrum between "I'm stingy" and "I'm a showoff" by going for small quantities of luxury items, like chocolates that are SO FANCY that you only get nine of them in a box.  Let people wonder which end of the spectrum I am!

+ + +

Ultimately, the stress comes from being self-focused instead of other-focused at a time when looking outward is especially important.  For reasons unknown, I have fixated on what people will think of me.  I'm hyperfocused on gift-giving as a performance, or as a statement.  This has made it nearly impossible for me to give gifts, authentically, as an expression of love for another person.  It's not that I want it to be like that; it's a cycle I'm trying hard to break out of.  It starts with thinking less about myself and how I will be perceived, and more simply about the reason that the gift-giving tradition arose in the first place

Comments

[Christy P.]

Spending 2 hours yesterday in an airport with carols on repeat was my own personal winter torture. I feel you.

[Jamie]

I love this post so much. Here is a gifting disorder fist bump, my friend.

[bearing]

Right back atcha, both of you.

[Kate]

This is an interesting read. I am one of those people who loves Christmas presents, both the receiving and the giving (more the giving). I like to give and receive thoughtful handmade things best, but my second favourite sort of gift is the gift card/liqueur/chocolates kind, so I think you've struck on something there. :-)

A Christmas without gift-giving would be hard for me. I would be like the relative that wanted to get you something to unwrap. I tend to fall on the multiple small items side of the spectrum, because I will make something, then buy something since I saved so much money by making the gift, then see something perfect and small to add...I love watching someone discover the next little goody after thinking they'd already gotten everything there was.

[Jamie]

So maybe this would be a place where I could say that I still WRITHE with embarrassment when I remember the year that my husband and I decided to give to a charity in his parents' honor in lieu of giving an ordinary wrapped gift. It was SO SO SO weird and awkward that the memory is painful. My MIL said, defensively, "Well, we DO give to charity, you know."

In a weird twist, my husband buys almost all the kid gifts and I buy all of the non-kid gifts. So I still feel like that one was on me. UGH.

[bearing]

Maybe this is one of those things where (like introverts and extroverts) there are two kinds of people and they really don't understand how the other kind works.

[Jamie]

Can we talk about that? Because I don't think my introversion is a disorder. (In fact, I just got a little indignant when asked to fill out a recommendation form from a sketchy for-profit school in which they asked me to rate my student on her introversion, as if it were a troublesome and undesirable quality). This feels to me like social anxiety, in which I'm certain I'm wrong no matter which side of the situation I'm on. If I don't like a gift I'm given, I feel bad. If I give a gift that the receiver doesn't like, I feel bad. These reactions do not really make sense to me, but here I am still writhing about something from...hm...4 years ago, I think, and wondering anxiously what to give my FIL this year.

[bearing]

No, I don't think introversion is a disorder, although I think extroverts treat it like it is.

I was thinking, maybe I'm not actually, you know, defective. Maybe Not Being Into Gifts is in fact an okay (but misunderstood) thing to be, like being introverted.

But you're right - "I'm certain I'm wrong no matter which side of the situation I'm on" -- that is what it feels like to me. And SO fixated on trying (in vain) not to feel wrong, that I can't possibly be anything but wrong.

[Jamie]

Maybe it's a continuum, like introversion. I am usually a healthy version of an introvert, in which I can talk comfortably to strangers and I don't obsess about "Wait, that was a dumb joke I made." But in some circumstances, that inner tendency (Too Many People = Meltdown) morphs into Not Very Many People At All = Meltdown. KWIM?

There must be a healthy flavor of gift-impaired somewhere, in which a person just doesn't care about getting/giving gifts very much, but can get the job done without curling up into a ball and weeping in the Christmas aisle at Target.

OR OR OR OR-- maybe it's just a quantity issue. Maybe I'm OK with birthday gifts throughout the year because they're spaced out. But there's so MUCH gift crap to deal with at Christmas, SO SO MUCH, that I just can't hack it. There are certain days when I want to say to my children, "Please stop putting words in my ears" because I'm on introvert overload. All of December is like that for the gift-impaired.

[Jamie]

Now I am having social anxiety about posting a comment in which I sound smug about people with more extreme introversion. Maybe I will just spew out all of my crazy right here in your comments section, yes?

I think I should probably get off the internet and go finish the rosary. I will be sure to ask the Blessed Mother for a spoonful of sanity.

[bearing]

Jamie, you're doing wonders for helping feel like I am not in fact crazy, or at least not the only person in the world with this particular brand of crazy.

[Jenny]

Ah, gifts. I don't love gifts. I enjoy picking out gifts for a certain few people, but the rest is total obligation. I don't know what they want and it is just a big guessing game. I feel cheap because my budget doesn't seem to look like anyone else's budget.

And then there is the problem of the relatives and my children. Oh they buy them so much stuff. I try to think of crafty ways to reduce the amount, but nobody is interested. They want to buy them stuff and lots of it and most of it is plastic junk. Just thinking about all the stuff headed our way is causing me to panic a bit.

For awhile, we were exchanging names between all my grandmother's great grandchildren. There are eleven. My sister and I have seven of them between us so really there are only four who are not already first cousins. We never see these children. One of them I haven't seen in at least four years. Can we stop this madness of sending packages to essentially stranger children? No, apparently we cannot. My sister and I have connived to reduce it to sending cookies, but the stress.

[Jenny]

I'd love to have a Christmas where we could stay home, but that isn't in the cards. Our Christmases have been a mad dash of travel from my parents to my in-laws to my mother's family to my father's family with hours of driving in between. It has always been this way. If I tried to just have a small family Christmas at home, that would be the cause of all kinds of hurt feelings so we travel and Christmas comes and goes and I feel all wrung out.

[Rebekka]

I enjoy buying presents for close family and friends. Receiving presents is ok. The frenzy of "I just bought what was on your wishlist" at Christmas seems so tasteless to me. We do Christmas with my husband's extended family, and it was INSANE until some of us put our foot down, and now we only give gifts to immediate family, and to children. (Although the number of children increased from three to six this year, so...)

But your Gift Anxiety thing is like how I feel about clothes. I like the idea of clothes and feel like I should care about "fashion", but the actual execution of the program is doomed to fail. Because I really don't care, and I want clothes that are functional, comfortable, and machine washable, and everything that does not meet those criteria does not get used. So I basically just have a uniform (and then I go to work where I have an actual uniform supplied and laundered by my employer, including outerwear, total win!) It sounds like you also have a gifting uniform, maybe you should just embrace it?

[Colette]

Entries like this would be why I keep coming back to your blog. Erin, you are my spirit animal.

I struggle with the trick of matching a gift with the person's actual interests while not offending my own sensibilities in purchasing something. Or, in the case of about half the family, forcing interests upon them in the hopes that they actually develop some sort of hobby.

Worse is hearing, "Oh, I don't need anything and I get whatever I want. You don't have to get me anything." What a trap -- I know full well that showing up empty-handed is NOT an option.

And then having to do it for all family members at the same time of the year? Kill me now.

[Jenny]

Ack! I forgot about the annual dismissal we get from my MIL declaring that we just don't need to buy her anything. I'm not that stupid, lady. That grudge would be held over our heads for eons if we dared to attempt it.

This year we are buying her chocolate and wine. One year we bought a whole bunch of different cheeses and another year was different teas. Special consumables is what we try to get.

[Jenny]

Every time I read through this I key on something else. Christmas cards! I intend to send Christmas cards every year and, to my shame, it hasn't happened since 2008 or 2009. In large measure it is because I feel obligated to send one to everyone when, in actuality, I haven't had time to send them to everyone. I also have scruples about not printing addresses, or worse, greetings on the computer. I feel compelled to do it all by hand, which as I said, I haven't had time for. Instead of just sending them to the few people I can manage, nobody gets them because I feel bad about it.

Unrelated to Christmas, but in the same genre of sending cards all together, my everlasting shame is how long it took me to write baby thank-you cards after O was born. They gave me a baby shower at work, less than a month before she was born. I was totally distracted and didn't get them written before birth. And then I was in recovery and then it was Christmas and then I was back at work and then I was spending every free moment nursing a baby. I was slowly getting them done, but didn't want to give them to anyone until they were all done.

Oh the shame of going back to work and seeing these people daily with the thank you notes hanging over my head. I finally, finally, slinked into the office and handed out thank notes a full six months after the baby shower. I wanted to crawl in a hole but I got it done.

[mandamum]

Ah, gifts. I am one of those weird "we don't do gifts on Christmas" people, and with only one set of grandparents who are still gift-focused, it works out pretty well. We do small gifts in shoes for St. Nicholas Day (kids have started adding their own little crafty gifts to each other), and chocolate coins for Epiphany. And we do family gifts (board games, gingerbread house making, membership to the science museum) during the 12 Days of Christmas. I don't know how the kids feel about it, but I do know that generally they enjoy the St. N gifting. The key for us is to find something interesting to do on Christmas morning, since we're not plowing through wrapping paper. Family games or puzzles usually work well, and a fire is always a hit.

As I read the comments, I wonder how much of the difference might be attributable to people whose "love language" includes gifts, and those who don't put a high priority on gifts. I can appreciate small (or edible) gifts, but I don't think it's anywhere near the top of the way I express love. And too many things at once (for me, or my kids) make me feel claustrophobic. Either it's "Stuff" I have to deal with, rather than a blessing, or it's a feeling too much money has been spent on something I am unlikely to appreciate enough. Or both. One year, I bought my grandmother and aunt an "I donated a goat in your name" type present, and they both seemed appreciative. I'd be appreciative of that kind of gift too :) No stuff, good feelings :) Ah, well.

[mandamum]

(Meant to add - I think part of the reason our family has ended up here is because gift-giving (and receiving, especially receiving!) was my least least favorite part of Christmas, growing up. I don't think I had the "performance" stress you experienced, but it always seemed a sour note among the sweet. Too much build-up, too much room for disappointment, I guess. I remember working hard to develop a mental habit of contentment, as I got into high school - guess that's a good outcome, but not as "sweet" as one might expect from Christmas gifts.)

[Jamie]

Love this comment thread almost as much as I love this post. It's like 2005 over here, she said nostalgically.

[bearing]

Seriously, I feel like so much less of a freak now.

The love language thing I might have to look into. Is that book stupid, or is it good?

[Jamie]

80-20 good-stupid, I'd say.

[rachel]

I don't know if this is helpful, validating, or irrelevant - adding it in the hope of the first two, of course. I'm Jewish, live in Israel, completely insulated from Christmas and gift-giving (and the Jewish-American Hannuka gift craze, which nobody does here). And from the outside, Christmas seems insane-making. Honestly, I don't know how you all do it: Erin's post seems the first sane formulation I've seen. You have so many people to think about! And you have to get the degree of intimacy and thoughtfulness just right! And the wrapping and the shipping - just seeing it from the outside makes me hyperventilate. You all seem unbelievably organized and heroic and talented for figuring it out every year.

[Barbara C.]

The 5 Love Languages is a bit of a mixed bag of a book. It, like most relationship books, needs a big disclaimer that "This will only make things worse if your significant other has an addiction or mental disorder or is a narcissist."

I think my biggest issue is that it doesn't distinguish between "doing acts of service" as a love language and "you're an adult so you need to get off your ass, clean up after yourself, and share the adult responsibilities". My ex-husband thought I was supposed to thrower a ticker-tape parade in his honor if he unloaded the dishwasher every day for a week...and treated it like a quid pro quo.

But I think it can be insightful if you are dealing with sane people.