You Can't Hug Gift Wrap

Low-money, High-meaning

I struggle with gift-giving every year, and as the years go by, I do less and less of it. We all have so much stuff. More just adds to the clutter. All of that clutter comes right out of the earth and then leaves huge carbon and garbage footprints behind. And, do all of those gifts really make you feel happier? If they do, that's great. But if you want to spice up your regular gift-giving or replace it all together, here are some wacky ideas you might want to try.

I developed many of these ideas for my sister's family, with whom I celebrate Hanukkah, which I celebrate better than I spell. I'll give suggestions for adapting these ideas for non-Jews. My sister's family is strung across the United States, so these ideas also focus on how to share experiences via social networks and technologies. However, these, too are adaptable, for low-tech folks. Please post a comment on this post if you try one of these ideas. Let me know how it went.

Please note: Get someone to create a Facebook page for your family's holiday activities if you try any of my suggestions. You'll need a place where you can post and view photos from each other and comment on the activities you choose to do.

Remember, I've already said "wacky." If you are looking for dignity, go somewhere else! Here we go...

Phone Chain. Organize a phone chain by alphabetical order of first names (or age, or location, whatever) for sharing something specific, like something you love about the callee. The first person calls the second person and tells him or her what makes him or her great, the second person calls the third, and so on. At the end, scramble up the names for another round of calls. Scramble the names for every night of Hanukkah (or 12 Nights of Christmas?), using topics like a favorite memory, things that made you jealous, if that person were a tree what kind would he or she be...be creative. Post or Tweet comments to each other if you want.

Sharing a meal. Pick one night of Hanukkah (or other holiday date, like Christmas Eve). Make sure that everyone in your group is eating the exact same food at the exact same time that day no matter what the time zone. Post photos of yourself eating for everyone else to see. Anything from Big Macs to fruit cake would be acceptable, as long as you are all together.

Holiday Collage. Have everyone take a photo of lighting the Menorah (can’t spell this very well either) or doing some other holiday ritual, like hanging a stocking on the mantle. Post the photos for each other. See if someone in your family has the talent to convert the photos into a family collage.

Give a Gift to a Stranger Day. Give something away--a dozen cookies, a pair of gloves, a snow globe--use your imagination--to a stranger. Just tell them it is "Give a Gift to a Stranger Day" to celebrate the holidays. How did it turn out? Any surprises? Share comments on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. (Or tell the next person on your  nightly phone chain about it!)

Random Acts of Kindness Day. This is a variation of giving a gift to a stranger. For a whole day you'll have to keep your radar out for ways to be kind. Have everyone keep track of and share the experience. How much good will can you generate as a family?

Remember When... Have each person write down a few Hanukkah (or Christmas, or Dewali, or Ramadan, or...) memories to make a little booklet. I bet someone in your family can use a graphics program to put a polish on the final product. And surely someone knows how to scan old photos into the mix.

Unity Feast Un-united. This idea is purely for the wackiness of it all. It makes no sense. I love it. Each family member is assigned to make one dish for the feast. But, since you can't be together, you'll only get to eat the one dish you fix. (You can snack later.) Like, one person does latkes, but that’s all that person gets to eat. Other people have dessert or a salad, but that’s all they get to eat. And so on. Eat this meal on the same night. You could try Skyping together as you eat. Post photos.

Wackiness Against the Machines. Call a vending service person to complain that your money won't fit into the money slot. Make the technician pull the fact out of you that you are trying to buy a diet coke with Hanukkah gelt (chocolate money wrapped in gold foil). Share your experiences. I know this is a bit mean, but humor can be ugly. Please don't call a service technician out of bed at midnight on Christmas Eve when there is a blizzard just to do this. Or, OK, go ahead.

Wackiness Against the Machines (a kinder version). Stand at a vending machine till someone comes along and then try to get the Hanukkah gelt to go in the slot and complain about it to the person waiting for you to finish. It's up to you what tack to take--puzzled, angry, surprised. I guess you could try fake (children's) toy money, but that could get you arrested. As usual, chocolate is always a good fallback position.

Three-Way. Get your mind out of the bedroom, I'm talking about phone calls. Do a three-way Skype (or other videophone technology) and try to sing a song together (something a little more complex than the Dreidel song--I recommend the Hallelujah Chorus). I suspect that some laughter might ensue therefrom.

Skype With Puppets. I've just recently had my first Jetsonesque videophone experience and I keep thinking of bizarre things to do. So, make sock puppets, or brown paper bag puppets, or just draw lips with a red pen on your thumb and forefinger. (No, you do not have permission to go to Pinterest for instructions. Use Google like regular people.) At the Skype time, have the puppets talk to each other on camera. I don't know what will happen.

Fright Makeup. Likewise, you have my permission to apply fright makeup before Skyping with your parents, no matter how old you or they are.

Do Good With Money (Real, not Chocolate).  Pick a particular charity and see how many donations your family can generate in a single day using your various networks—email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, phone, knocking on doors, begging at bus stations. Have people donate in honor of a departed loved one or a famous hero like Rosa Parks or Harvey Milk. May I recommend Outreach International (outreach-international.org/) if you don’t have a charity in mind? This is actually a socially responsible suggestion--how did it sneak in here?

Chocolate Money Attack. Go out on purpose to put Hanukkah gelt into Salvation Army bellringers’ buckets. You decide whether to sneak it in or do it for all to see. Share your experiences. Have a handful of (real) coins or a five-dollar bill ready to sooth any bristled feelings and provide plausible deniability. "Oh, that's right, I keep the real money in my other pocket!" Remember, they're not called "army" for nothing'.

Be extravagant. Do a nightly Skype call to discuss anything you’ve been doing. You can even Skype together as you light your Menorahs every night, or as you open a window on your advent calendar.

Rewrite. Change the words of a popular holiday tune or verse to describe your family. For my family, we'd have to find rhymes for outrageous, talkative, and loyal (of course, royal). You are only limited by your personal tolerance for weirdness.

SIDEBAR: THE SOLSTICE

The winter solstice occurs on December 21 or 22. Every year. It's not something to believe in, like a religious faith. It's an event that happens and has happened every year of your life. The darkness is over! The sunshine is returning! This is my favorite event of the winter. Go druid. Affix leaves to your gonads and run around on a hillside. Just have a party. Turn on every light in your house. Put on suntan lotion on spec.

To me, the solstice is also a reminder of the strange coincidence that allows life to exist on earth--if the earth tilted a little more or a little less, or if it orbited a little closer or a little farther from its star, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here to marvel at ourselves, to tremble with outrage, to cry with sorrow, to feel like the most important thing in the whole universe, to gawk, to wonder, to love. We wouldn't be here to be wacky and then recognize our own wackiness, and then laugh uproariously, and then to reflect on it. I'm glad we're here on our little blue marble in space.

SIDEBAR: KINDNESS ECONOMY

Kindness is one of the few things you can give away that actually enriches you--and as you spend kindness, the amount of kindness in the world actually increases. It's not like spending money with its scarcity--if I have more someone else has less. And you count kindness to any living thing or to our planet itself as kindness. I invite you to join me in promoting the giving of kindness. Here's one way to work it.

1. Consciously plan to do one nice thing for someone, do it, and say to yourself, “This kindness is my gift to [recipient’s name here].” The target of the kindness is not the recipient--the recipient is your loved one for whom you normally buy a commercial gift.

2. Then, write down what you did and send it to the recipient you chose. His or her heart will be warmed with the thought that kindness is increasing and that you have good values!

3. Your kindness doesn’t need to be a deprivation or a sacrifice. It doesn’t have to entail great planning or expense. And it doesn’t have to cost anything at all.

Your kindness won’t clutter up or pollute our Earth. I guarantee that it will be just exactly the right style, size and color. It will be a gift of your heart that warms the hearts of others. If you plan to give a gift for the holidays this year, make it a gift from the kindness economy.

SIDEBAR: TOURIST DESTINATION LANDFILL

Yes, you can arrange tours of your local landfill for your family, usually by contacting the solid waste authority in your area or the owner of the landfill if it is private. One year I toured the Franklin County Landfill--the largest artificial structure in the state of Ohio. It is acres and acres of garbage...and not garbagy garbage like banana peels and apple cores and chicken bones. Most of the garbage is stuff, just stuff, or stuff that stuff was sold in, stuff that might have been gifts. And much of it is in perfectly good condition. I saw whole buildings dumped into the landfill, not even chunked up much. I saw a huge amount of recyclables. That's what I saw. Ask what I smelled! Ask about the flock of sea gulls that have adapted to living at the landfill because of the good eats. Next, ask what I didn't see--the thousands or millions of cubic yards of buried garbage.

The landfill was fascinating. Turns out, it's not the giant compost pile we are led to believe, in which garbage will gradually biodegrade into mulch. It's more like a series of gigantic Ziploc bags--pockets of garbage hermetically sealed in plastic. The whole landfill is lined with nonporous clay and other materials that ensure that no leakage occurs. In a poem, I refer to the landfill as a huge pile of MREs (the military's "meals-ready-to-eat" bags of food) for future generations. (Future generations refers to your own children and grandchildren--yes, those kids right there.)

OK, so I ranted. But you'll be glad you went if you go.

Reflections on...Yard-saling

Blogger is reporting from Middletown, Ohio, home of pater familias Bob Dickerson, at the conclusion of Day 2 of yard-salin’.
          I am hot, sticky, sale-shocked, eating nothing but sugar and carbs, and stupefied with water weight gain. My ankles are not looking dainty right now in the brand new shoes I bought at the yard sale next door for $3.00—Naturalizers with a nice low heel and ankle straps that are hiding under rolls of bloated tissue. "Next door" is the Middletown Senior Center, which is also having a yard sale today—some venders out on the lawn; and in the cafeteria/multi-purpose room, donated items sorted into categories—very tidy. 

          Yes, my dad (who is pretty sharp--selectively) is never slack about piggy-backing on the marketing of others—the balloons and colorful signs for the senior center also guided buyers (buyers-beware) into his ample front yard. Under the beautiful old oak by the street we spread our merchandise on large tables, loosely grouped by category (books, housewares, toys, clothing, etc.) and by source (my sister Kathy, my dad’s friend Melanie, and his neighbor Charlotte).

We had this very Vera Bradley
bag for sale--and it was
priced too high to sell

        I threw my stuff in with Dad’s stuff and didn’t worry about making money. I live to serve (ha-ha-ha) and helped out wherever necessary. The other stuff-providers, though, had certain prices they wanted for certain items and we had lots of counter-pricing going on—Dad and I were pretty much always ready to deal (Will you take $5 for this? Yes). We definitely had too many captains and not enough sailors, and even though I was there to be a sailor, well, nobody thinks I’m shy, so my opinion was often added to the pricing puree.
          The crowd at Dad’s sale differed greatly from sales in my hometown of McArthur, Ohio. In McArthur, the people are poorer, are sometimes desperate, and are often looking for low-priced necessities, not novelties or kitsch. The Middletown crowd was made up of a lot of seniors (because of the neighboring sale) and the people were pretty well off.

Typical house in Dad's neighborhood; he,
however, lives in a Cape Cod.

          Dad lives in a moderate house in a blue collar, aging area, but his street is ringed by higher-cost housing—and they came out to support the seniors (and thus Dad). It was odd to be around so many well-off people, I’m so used to the low-income people of my town. We are different in both dress and conversation. The most significant commonality was love for children and grandchildren. In both towns, people are happy to talk about children and want to buy nice things for them. They look over children’s items with critical eyes.

         Because so many different people brought stuff, we had an interesting sale—not overloaded with children’s clothing or sports equipment or any other category. Well, OK, we had too many purses, probably. And they were overpriced and the women selling them would not bargain or cut the price. I assume these purses will be leftover unsold.

          I spent lots of time getting into and out of a lawn chair (moved gradually across the yard throughout the day—to follow the shade) and a fair amount of time just chatting up the customers. Each one has a story to tell.   
          One thirty-something woman pulled up on the other side of the fence next to the driveway in a van. She got out and asked us if we wanted a walker. Dad jumped right on it and started to talk price. (Resale of lightly used medical equipment usually leads to a tidy profit.) But the woman insisted that she was giving us the walker, she wanted to give it away. Her mother had died two years ago this weekend and she was just now able to face the medical aids left over from her mom’s illness. She would be glad for Dad to make some money off of it and for it to go to people who needed it.
          We all quieted while she told us the story of her grief, and handled with respect the walker that she pulled out of the back of the van and handed over the fence. Over the fence came a portable toilet. Over the fence came two different bath benches. Over the fence came an elevated toiled seat. Over the fence came a long-handled shoe horn and sock-helper stick. Over the fence came an anti-bedsore mattress (with air pump).

         The woman’s van was crammed with stuff. She cried. Each of us had at least a quivering lip if not a tear. Turns out we were helping her with a significant event in her grieving. She and we were all sacred for a moment, right across the fence, under the oak, next door to the senior center, on Central, in Middletown, on a summer afternoon, in August.
          Sacred.

          At our most human.
         That’s yard-salin’.

Sidebar: Bob Dickerson’s Rules of the Yard Sale  My dad worked in the shoe business for several years and even though he didn’t like it very well (you had to have more loyalty to and spend more time with the store than your family), he has a natural bent toward retail. He has many sensible rules for his sales (he says, however, that no rule can't be broken). Here are some of his guidelines.
        Make some money even if you cannot make the money you want. You won’t get rich with a yard sale, but you might get some mad money to play with.
        Keep stuff off the ground as much as possible. People are not in the habit of looking down. Borrow some tables if you need to, or stretch a board across some chairs. Whatever. Dad has many tables that have detachable legs so he can store them flat.

         Fit your tables to your tarps (for sales longer than one day). Dad lays down the tall items on a table, sticks other stuff under the tables, and then throws on a tarp that fits right over that set of tables—clamp, clamp, clamp, and you’re closed.

        Open early--at least be ready at the designated start time. And, decide how you want to handle “early birds”—those people who come the night before a sale or show up at 7:00 a.m. for your sale that you advertised to start at 9:00. Dad doesn’t worry about fairness or justice—he’ll sell to any early bird who wants to shop.

        Have shade or canopies—anything that encourages people to linger a bit is good. Dad doesn’t usually sell food, but on a cool day I think an urn of coffee would not go amiss. It takes a long time to drink a cup of coffee.

        Mark prices on every item or keep all the items in a group at the same price.

        Keep prices divisible by $0.25 or $1.00; this way, you save tons of time making change—and you only need to get quarters from the bank.

        Be ready to make change. Have at least $10 in quarters, fifty one-dollar bills and 10 five-dollar bills. (Remember, you’ll get this money back out at the end.)

        Greet each customer with a smile. Have bags available for their stuff. Circulate. Tell the customer something about the item he or she is handling.

        Keep it tidy. Kathy and I spent a lot of time straightening tables, filling in gaps.

        Only put out clean merchandise. No one will buy filthy items and they bring down the whole sale. If you want to sell them, put a low price on them. Salt-stained boots? They will sell at $1.00 but not at $5.00.

         Fix broken things, if it is not too expensive. Dad recently painted the handlebars of two tricycles he bought for $5, turning $5 items into $15 items.

        Have various sizes of batteries and an electrical outlet (or plugged-in extension cord) so customers can see if things work.

        Don’t keep everything you don’t sell. Drop it off at a Salvation Army, Goodwill, AmVets, the Red Door Thrift Store, or any number of other charitable organizations.

        Don’t hold things for people unless they pay in advance. You should always stay free to sell what you have.

        Make your sale visible—put some large, sexy items out by the street. Don’t hide your light (or merchandise) under a bushel, folks. Balloons are a great attention-getter on your signs and at your site.

        Coffee mugs, golf clubs, crutches, dolls, winter clothes at summer sales—hard to sell.

        Clean stuffed animals, tools, medical equipment (except crutches), furniture, jewelry—easy to sell. However, just about anything will sell if you price it right (low).

        Have the courage to be generous. Dad often gives away toys to kids, or throws in a free item here and there. As my dad testifies, generosity almost always returns to the giver.