With Christmas Gifts, Don't Ask and Don't Tell

Meghan Cox Gurdon has an idea for making holiday gift-giving more fun: stop asking people "What do you want for Christmas?"

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Meghan Cox Gurdon has an idea for making holiday gift-giving more fun: stop asking people "What do you want for Christmas?"

"What do you want for Christmas?" "A powder-blue Alfa Romeo."

"Very funny. Seriously, what do you want for Christmas?"

"Whatever you'd like to give me."

"Well, I want to give you something you'd like to receive."

"And I want to receive whatever you think you'd like to give me. You don't actually have to give me anything. "

"Of course I do. So what do you want?"

Round and round it goes, the asking of this terrible question. Personally, I've been trying to discourage it for at least a decade (see above), but nonetheless, every yuletide, up it comes. The children ask me what I want. They ask their father. They ask each other. Their father occasionally asks me what I want. And -- hypocrisy alert! -- I'm pretty sure that I sometimes ask it, too.

And why not, you might wonder? Surely inquiring about what people want springs from tenderheartedness toward them. We simply want to choose gifts that they will genuinely welcome. Don't we all secretly want to be the agent of our loved ones' holiday delight?

Well, sure. Bald practicality has a role here, too. With limited funds, it seems prudent to direct resources toward presents that will yield maximum satisfaction. What better gifts than those that have been prescreened and preapproved by the customer, er, recipient?

The trouble is, coming up with suggestions for one's own gifts makes the whole business far too bloodlessly transactional. I tell you what I want, you buy (or make) it for me, wrap it up, and hand it over on Christmas morning -- or during Hanukkah or Festivus or Winterval, whenever that is. The farce concludes with me removing the wrapping and feigning surprise at the manifestation of the thing I'd ordered upon your request.