My sister is impossible to buy for and I have finally worked out why.
Every year I buy my sister something thoughtful and every year it goes into the cupboard with the other thoughtful things, and we both pretend this is not happening.
I was buying her things that expressed how well I know her. A book about the thing she likes. An ornament shaped like the thing she likes. Objects whose entire function was to demonstrate that I had paid attention.
The trouble with an object whose only job is to be meaningful is that it has no second job. Once it has been meaningful, on the day, in front of people, it is done. So it goes in the cupboard, because where else does it go.
The things of mine she still has are, without exception, things with a use. A jug. A blanket. A stupid bottle with a joke on it that she has taken to work every day for two years.
None of those were my cleverest presents. Two of them I bought slightly guiltily, thinking they were not personal enough.
Give someone the version of their obsession that has a job. If they love a thing, do not buy them a tribute to it. Buy them something they will hold four hundred times a year that happens to be about it.
It feels lazier. It is not. It just means the object keeps working after the moment is over, and the moment is the part you were buying for anyway.
['Her birthday is in three weeks and I have already bought it, which has never once happened before.']
Nora