Dad's Chair - Online Exclusive
You Can't Always Give What They'll Use
By Greg Benson
November 2010

I can't wait to see what my boys are going to get me for Christmas. 

I'll probably have to; they're not too into gifts, save for ones with their names emblazoned on them. Yes, once in a while, Sam or Max will reel off a sketch on a folded sheet of paper and unceremoniously drop it on my lap while I'm on the phone with a distant relative. However, if I asked them where our wrapping paper is stored, they'd have no idea it's kept in a crumpled paper bag and jammed hideously into the corner of the hall closet by the vacuum cleaner-whose whereabouts of which they are also ignorant. (I'm not even sure they know we have closets.)

I'm not saying they are selfish; now and then, they do go out and pick some flowers for their mom, no doubt employing a method used by their dad in 1969 for his own mother.  "I imagined you picked them at the Calhouns," Mom says now, and she's correct. Only 5, I figured they weren't doing anyone any good outside some old lady's house where no one could see them. I saw it as a rescue mission and a way to uphold my mother's high opinion of me.

She wasn't as thrilled when, on her next birthday, I came home from a walk and presented her with a big basket of damp laundry.

Though I probably made that story up, I do believe I was pretty consistent in my gift giving to my parents and even my siblings. I'd generally buy them things I wanted for myself, knowing they'd go unused; a few months later, I'd generously take them off the owners' hands.

I believe that practice is known in psychology circles as "mirroring."

One exception was when I was thrust--along with my brothers--into a special kind of store in the Whitehall (Pa.) Mall. Its concept was that only kids could purchase its items, after which the lady at the counter would approve and gift-wrap them. I browsed for about 10 minutes before spotting a package of the most beautifully colored balls I'd ever seen. Although I wasn't quite sure what bath oil beads were, I was certain my mother would absolutely flip out when she unwrapped them.

Her reaction was somewhat more reserved than I'd hoped, but that was just fine with me, because I got an electric football set that morning. (You could have dumped eggnog all over my leisure suit, and I still would have been happy as a wet lark. Electric football was, in 1973, the most innovative advance of mankind's still-young history.)  I wasn't as upbeat when I found the still-sealed beads in my mom's closet the following December when I was rooting around for 1974's yet-unwrapped Christmas presents.

Why wouldn't she try them? Did she not think she was glamorous enough? Would it kill her to plop a weird red ball into the tub while she soaked?  "I do remember the bath oil beads you gave me in 1973," she says now, not elaborating and still wishing to spare my feelings.

I guess oil beads weren't the sort of thing every mom wanted. "The homemade pictures and gifts were the most precious to me," says Mom. Turns out what she wanted the most-and sometimes received-was pretty much what my boys give me almost every holiday and birthday: something they made themselves.

If only they knew how to construct an electric football set.

Greg Benson is a gift-giver (and occasionally a receiver) who lives in Athens with his wife, Kris, and his two sons, Sam and Max.