Birthdays and Gifts
Is there any risk so dangerous, as a parent or a lover, as the risk of forgetting somebody's birthday? I have fallen foul of this great sin. It can take weeks or months to clear away the fallout. And while the invent of electronic calendars has gone some way towards helping us to avoid such moments of disgrace and dismay, I for one still show an incredibly stubborn propensity for making the mistake regardless.
People have different strategies for avoiding the error. My own mother and father,
I discovered to my disillusionment one summer's day, have a stash of impromptu gifts at the back of their wardrobe – a 'rainy day fund' of presents and cards. It is a sagacious parental move and I am retrospectively impressed, but at the time I distinctly remember their rather garbled attempts to explain that, “They're not for you, of course, they're for cousins and friends. We always remember your birthday…”
Myself, I have always been more partial to setting up an elaborate set of alarms to alert me to any impending days of the year when I am required to fork out and show that (a) I care and (b) my memory is still in good working order. That one should be a corollary of the other is a cultural idiosyncrasy of ours that I have never fully understood.
Still, this system fails like all the others. It is possible to set a sufficient number of alarms that you will not get off to sleep until, usually, the exact point that you are supposed to (by which stage you have become thoroughly numbed to both the sound and the purpose of your alarms). So what are we to do? Love each other more, so that we simply never forget?
I certainly doubt the link between the reliability of one's memory and the depth of one's love. So perhaps the best policy is to make sure than, on those occasions that you don't forget, you do your loved one justice with a really well chosen gift. Here is the irony – we hardly seem to give half as much importance to this aspect of birthday etiquette. Are we a quantity before quality society?
If you want the answer to be no, here is my humble suggestion. Don't just buy your children pyjamas – buy them the perfect PJs. Spend a good half-hour or more rustling through all manner of designer children pyjamas until you stumble upon something absolutely ideal. Try to find something meaningful (again, amount spent is often – wrongly, in my view – prioritized above amount of thought put in). Everything symbolizes something – find a gift that alludes to a shared joke, a story, a desire or fascination of the recipient.
For me, at least, this is what birthdays should be about. They are not there to show off our immaculate memories; they are not there to splash money about. The point of birthdays is to celebrate somebody's birth. Obvious? Well, then – find a present that does just that. And if you forget until it's too late, well… when it comes to appreciating someone, it's never too late.
