December is the season of gifting in our Judo-Christian world, though most religious experts would warn against too strong an emphasis on securing material gifts for the holidays. All our thinking, planning, shopping, (or if you’re old-fashioned, artistic, or poor), making, followed by wrapping, and sometimes mailing or shipping, culminating in giving and receiving, takes a great deal of time and energy. As we remember the speed with which the gift opening ritual flies by, we pray it will be worth all our efforts.
Kids in the Detroit neighborhood my children grew up in, put their focus, as I suppose most kids do, on the receiving end of gifting. They had a running argument about which of the gift rituals they were familiar with were better, getting one gift each day for eight days during the season of Chanukah or a bunch of presents all at once on a Christmas morning. Since none of the kids experienced personally both rituals to compare, the matter had to remain unsettled.
We’ve heard it’s better to give than receive, but is that always true? As adults who pride ourselves on our independence, we may overlook the fact that in allowing someone to give to us, we may be giving a gift to them. When I was growing up we kids would search and search each year for just the right gift to give our father, something he would like that we could spend our babysitting or leaf-raking money on. Given later accumulated evidence that he never wore any of the sweaters or ties we gave him, we did not succeed. I’ve come to realize he was the kind of man whose desires were simple to non-existent, who couldn’t imagine a new sweater being as good as the old familiar one he’d already broken in. Yet there is still a disappointment that we couldn’t give him pleasure or comfort, or that he wasn’t able to receive our symbols of love.
“People want to help, they want to do something,” my daughter Corinne told me when she was mothering three young children and struggling with a treatment for her Beast Cancer that wasn’t working. Friends and family came forth with offers to help and Corinne graciously accepted most all of them. There were the women who took turns preparing and delivering meals to her home several times a week for what turned out to be nearly two years. When she was out of town for treatment, one of her friends gave her the gift of doing her Christmas shopping along with her own. She accepted another women’s offer to wrap those gifts, and when many neighbors and friends pooled their extra outdoor lights to decorate the outside of her family home as a surprise, that gift became a spectacular welcome home and encouragement to keep on going after a hospital stay that had offered mostly a discouraging treatment outcome.
As I check off the items on my holiday preparation “to-do” list I remind myself that all the behaviors I have performed to accomplish these tasks I’m checking off are simply ways to make my love visible to those I love. After all, “making love visible” is my favorite definition of what any ritual is.
What are your favorite gifts and gifting rituals? I’d love to hear whether they are feeding your soul at this busiest of times.
Sheila
