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Giver beware!
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Think of the huge amount of storage space it would save in millions of homes if the business of gifting could be done away with
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Token gifts are easier to tackle than gifts from friends, and utilitarian ones easier to donate than the decorative. - photo: Reuters.
CAN'T USE it, can't throw it, can't sell it, can't bestow it. What do you do with an unwanted gift? It is brand new, so you cannot bear to dump it along with the oozing tealeaves and chicken bones and vegetable peels. You could, if you're creative enough, put it to some use — not necessarily the one for which it was intended. But what you usually do is either dispatch it to the loft where it mingles with other orphaned things, or leave it untended until it reaches a stage in its life when you can guiltlessly fling it away.
Last month I went to a housewarming and got the standard "return gift", a silver kumkum holder. I don't wear kumkum nor am I the sort who offers it when female guests leave after a visit. Since the container was not a box but the open-mouthed kind, shaped like a miniature trophy, I wondered whether I should place it on top of the TV and tell people I won it in primary school for coming second in the lime and spoon race. But that would have meant displacing the Feng Shui Buddha that my domestic employee had very sweetly gifted me on my last birthday. If I moved the little Buddha to the top of the fridge I would have to evict at least one of the many existing tenants — most of which are gifts.
To come back to the question, what do you do with an unwanted gift? How many timepieces, ashtrays and scented candles does one person need? How many wall hangings can one house hold? Token gifts are easier to tackle than gifts from friends, and utilitarian ones, easier to donate than the decorative. Remember those wedding gifts from the Seventies? You got more rice cookers and milk cookers than you knew what to do with, so you simply re-packed and offloaded them at the next wedding you were invited to. Today's marriage invitations have postscripts that firmly say "No presents please" or, more winsomely, "Your presence rather than your presents". But gifts continue to pour in: place mats, casseroles, glasses and dessert bowls.
The problem with wedding gifts is that, however useless they are, you tend to hang on to them for sentimental reasons. Sulking in my attic is a neglected picnic set: a hefty red and cream plastic receptacle stacked with matching red and cream plastic dabbas, cups, plates, forks, spoons, and salt and pepper shakers. Somehow, I can't picture myself going on a Sunday picnic to Cubbon Park with it swinging merrily from my aching shoulder (didn't I mention the cream shoulder strap?).
Even as I say this I know that I too have plied people with unwanted objects. Convention is often to blame. Convention demands that you attend a function you wish you could avoid, and not go empty-handed. Enter — the token gift. Picked up at the last minute from a gift shop or lifestyle store. Carried like a burden to the venue and handed over as quickly as possible so that you can make good your escape. I think the custom should be banned. Think of the huge amount of storage space it would save in millions of homes.
There are also the token thank-you gifts people feel obliged to award you when they invite you to deliver a lecture or judge a contest. Mementos, I'm happy to report, are an extinct species. I'm talking about those hideous plaques in brass, bronze, or silver-plated/gilded steel, mounted on teakwood, embossed with the name of an organisation or association. I've received a couple of those horrors in my time and although I was tempted to feed them to a roaring fire, what I did was to leave them behind when I moved house. Nowadays, flowers and cards are the done thing. They're perishable. Excellent choice.
Friends usually choose gifts with care. They know exactly what you want, and if they don't, you can tell them. But sometimes even they can go wrong. An English friend gave me an expensive printed silk scarf, which I cannot wear unless I go through an extreme makeover, dress-wise, and switch to slit skirts, silk blouses and jackets. I have used it to drape the music system. Similarly, there's an exquisite Wedgewood China box in which you'd expect to find pieces of jewellery. It's got safety pins in it.
On a related subject that concerns you, the reader, what do you do with the varied supplements that your paper gifts you? What does not interest you might go straight to the raddi pile. I do, however, find them the perfect size to put my pillow on when I sun it on the balcony ledge (though the new demi size of some newspapers is too narrow). As for glossy art paper Sunday supplements, I wait for them with bated breath. The moment they arrive I whisk them away, unread, to the kitchen. They are ideal for rolling out chapathis onto, and scraping coconut onto. As for certain non-glossy weekday supplements that are absorbent, I line my rubbish bin with them.
Now that's a brand-new "gift" in which I dump, with no qualms, the oozing tealeaves, the chicken bones, the vegetable peels...
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