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Note: This blog post was written by Kathleen, CMAEON’s resident blog editrix and all around comic relief. The advice inside is not to be followed under any circumstances.

Ah…. Christmas. A time to spend time with your loved ones, and remind them of how much their friendship and support means to you. With presents.

Coming right out and saying it now – Christmas shopping sucks. Whether you’re getting everything wrapped by November 1^st, or scrambling at the last minute on Christmas Eve, there is much humming and hawing to do as part of the gift selection process, most of it pointless.

Really, if you’ve spent any time trying to buy gifts for the people you love, at some point you’ll end up wandering a busy mall alone, muttering to yourself as you try to find a quiet corner so you can weep softly and wallow in the futility of your actions.

Imagine trying to buy a gift. It should be: useful/romantic/clever/inspiring/fun/practical. Insert any word of your choice here, whatever you choose, you won’t find a gift that matches. If by some miracle, you DO manage to find the perfect gift, reality will crush your hopes and dreams as you realize that it’s not: available/within your price range/appropriately big/small/equivalent to what they’ll get you.

The gift selection process is then FURTHER complicated when you include the usual variety of mitigating factors that must be considered in agonizing detail before any selection is made:

1. The recipient has a small living space
2. The recipient is a parent and pretty much has everything they want or need by now
3. The recipient is a parent only really likes one kind of gift, and a sibling has already announced loudly that they will be buying that gift, and therefore you will be the one left to pray for divine intervention as you weep softly in a quiet corner of a busy mall (hi Sister, thanks btw)
4. The recipient is planning to move in the new year
5. The recipient is the kind of person who buys everything they want, the bastard
6. The recipient is some sort of goddamned Buddhist monk who wants for nothing, the bastard
7. The recipient is your significant other and you’re pretty much out of ideas after their birthday and holy hell, they didn’t like the anniversary gift much, so there’s a lot riding on this!
8. They will get mad if you spend whatever they consider to be “too much money” (hi Dad)
9. They will get secretly mad if you spend whatever they consider to be “too little money” (hi Sister, again)

Of course, you could just give up. Who needs to give a gift that elicits tears of joy, whoops of glee or cries of excitement when you just could give someone a copy of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen on Blu-ray and be done with it. Preferably to someone that does not yet own a Blu-ray player.  I know several people who employ this strategy, and it is above all, disappointingly consistent.

So what should you do? Should you search for great gifts, at the expensive of your sanity? Or should you give up and live with the lingering guilt of giving things that are neither beautiful nor useful; determinedly dragging yourself through the mall in Decemeber, performing a grim pantomime of gift buying, feeling your heart deaden as you select a Blu-ray called 10 years of Top Gear! The Stig’s Greatest Timed Laps in a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder for your 93 year-old Great Aunt who can’t drive.

My professional recommendation is to attempt to alienate the people in your life you find impossible to shop for.

This is a true story, that I feel, accurately captures the REAL magic of the season. Many years ago, my sister and I exchanged Christmas gifts. My sister had gone through a “bit of a goth phase”, if one could classify “a bit” as several years during high school where she refused to leave the house unless she was dressed for a latex fetish funeral. However, two years into university, her hair had regained its natural colour, and brown was optimistically forging beachheads in her wardrobe.

For Christmas, I selected a warm, stylish, grey and white striped sweater for her. We exchanged gifts. I received a bookstore gift card. I was happy. Nothing says “I value your sisterhood to the tune of exactly $35 dollars” like a $35 dollar Chapters gift card. I presented her the sweater. She was… to describe the situation in delicate terms, extremely unhappy.

“Why would you buy me this?” she cried out in anger. “It’s grey and white! It’s horrible!”

“It’s in style, it’s warm, it’s not colourful, and it’s part angora… I thought you’d like it,” I sputtered.

“Why would you buy A GOTH a grey and WHITE sweater?” she yelled.

At this point, reminding her she was CURRENTLY wearing blue jeans and a grey shirt only seemed to inflame an already dangerously inflamed situation. After several more minutes of being (loudly) called a terrible sister, I offered to exchange gifts. She could keep the Chapters card, and I would keep the offending sweater. She agreed and stormed out.

I exchanged the sweater for a version in my size, proceeded to wear the hell out of it and received several compliments on it. My sister and I have not exchanged Christmas gifts or greetings since what is now called by my father, “the Great and Terrible Christmas Sweater Incident of 2006”.

I consider this a moral victory.

Of course, your mileage on this approach may vary. If you’re looking for a little bit of Christmas cheer to warm the cockles of your heart between trips to the mall, check out the CMAEON animated Christmas card. Its short and tells and wonderfully sweet story. Its rather the opposite of this blog post in that regard.

Happy holidays from the CMAEON staff.

Image: Alex Tran, Atran Photography.