YouWish

The May-June period of every year is fraught with retail fear for me. While others are busy buying up their holiday wardrobes, picking up sun block or choosing bestsellers to take to the beach, I’m starting the biggest retail challenge outside of Christmas.

From 17^th May to 11^th July, I have to sort out birthday presents for my son, my brother, a nephew, a half-sister, my Dad, my Grandad and my Mum. Add to that an anniversary present for my husband – and frequently one for me, too, to save his blushes – and sorting out Father’s Day, and this becomes both challenging and expensive.

Harvey, thankfully, is at an age where almost anything with wheels on would do the trick – and long may that continue! My brother can be nudged into updating his Amazon wishlist if I’m truly lacking inspiration. But the rest are more difficult.

Once upon a time, I had the time and the energy to think carefully and in great detail about what would please each recipient most, whether for birthdays or Christmas. I earned something of a reputation for choosing presents people enjoyed, and so people apparently anticipated that, whatever they opened from me, it would be something they liked, whether they had ever thought of wanting one before that or not.

This is obviously not sustainable. For one thing, inspiration can dry up for all kinds of reasons. For another, time and money may also come to play their part. I have married into a large family where they all see each other regularly, so cousins, aunts and uncles all expect presents as well. At the same time, while they all expect presents, not all of them apply much thought to the presents they give –including one lot I’ve caught recycling presents from one year to the next while just removing the sell-by labels – so I have been known to feel resentful of the efforts made when all I’ll get is the equivalent of the metaphorical pair of socks or cartoon tie.

Last Christmas, therefore, with time and money pretty tight, I decided to make presents for the majority of the family, buying things only for parents, siblings and children. The rest were given two different types of chutney, some gingerbread biscuits, some coconut ice and some vanilla fudge. Mr Melanie and I agreed that people would either genuinely appreciate the thought of a handmade gift that took hours to make, or would be too polite to say anything. We won, either way.

This was hugely successful, and it had the added bonus that Harvey was able to help out. And when my arthritis got too much to handle the coconut ice, even my husband got involved, so we could say the presents were truly a family effort. The family genuinely seemed to enjoy receiving something home-made… and I managed to sort out Christmas presents for 30 or so people for £150 total.

Birthdays, however, can’t as easily be handled. After all, Harvey views biscuits as a human right, not a present. My brother is rarely home to eat any culinary gift I might make him. My father’s birthday this year was his 60^th, so jam and sweets weren’t really going to be quite the thing, my 17 year old half-sister is not an easy one to guess at and… you get the picture.

You would have thought, with the advent of the internet, that these tasks became simpler, but it seems that’s just not the case. There are any number of sites that offer ‘present finder’ applications, where you broadly give them gender and age band and hope they come up with something not too hideous, but none of them are doing anything very clever. Also, the results they come up with depend in large part on what they have to offer on their site, which may in fact not have anything you’d want to give the person in question, but by the time you’ve gone through their results you almost feel you have to buy something there, if only to justify spending 20 minutes or more going through what they think a 60 year old male might like.

Findmeagift.com doesn’t really help me much: their ‘men’s gifts’ include such delights as a ‘boob stress reliever’ or a ‘breast mug’ or that other masculine must-have, the swearing parrot key ring. And there’s no way I’m buying Dad a ‘candy posing pouch’.

A question on Yahoo Answers asking about birthday gifts for a 60 year old man elicited such thoughtful responses as ‘three 20 year old girls’, haemorrhoid cream, Viagra or a massaging recliner. Notwithstanding the potential objections my stepmother may have to some of the options, Dad’s a pretty young 60, so off I went again.

There are, of course, various options to get a fake newspaper printed to mark the big day, just as there is the chance to get hold of a front page from the date he was born, but that again seemed to be just rubbing in the age thing, and I couldn’t see Dad glancing at it more than once, so that idea was binned.

In fact, overall, the quality of the recommendations was dire. About the only thing that showed any real thought was a recommendation for a site that produces custom jigsaw puzzles from photos you supply… but even then I wasn’t convinced. It’s not really Dad’s thing. And that’s ignoring all the nasty pre-designed gift packages containing CDs of music from the forties and a low-content history book about 1949 packaged with a photo album or maybe a framed collection of stamps from that year instead.

For all our technology, then, we still seem to have no further advance on finding the perfect gift for someone special. Not in any automated sense. I want to give something that says ‘I care enough to find you something you’ll really like’, not ‘I needed to find you something and ran out of ideas’. Not that I’m averse to a little help along the way, but it seems clear my expectations of what constitutes the perfect gift differ from those of the sites trying to sell me things.

The solution? In the end, I cast my mind back to Christmases and birthdays past. In fact, I had a pretty good track record for getting Dad something he liked, since by his own admission nobody ever bought it for him and yet it was what he really wanted. Callaway HX Hot Plus golf balls. Not exciting, no. But the genuine pleasure on his face said I had, finally, found the perfect gift.