What a lovely scene - logs crackling in the fireplace, a row of stockings hung on the mantel, a big Christmas tree adorned with lights and ornaments. Eager children bound down the stairs in their pajamas, and everyone crowds around to see what's piled high under the tree.
Gift cards. The floor looks like the blackjack table at Wynn's Las Vegas. As for piled high, forget it. You could buy 500 gift cards and the stack of stuff under the tree wouldn't be six inches tall.
What ever happened to boxes that drove you crazy trying to guess what was in them? For that matter, what ever happened to the hideous, or just hideously inappropriate, gift from the aunt who thinks you look lovely in apple green?
Gift cards are supposed to take the exchange out of giving. They're the laissez-faire solution to the agony of Christmas shopping: Let the recipient do whatever he or she darn pleases with twenty-five bucks at the Gap; it's the best way to make sure that everyone gets the right gift. We're supposed to see real presents as a dictatorial attempt to impose our faulty will on others. In the world of gift cards, love truly means never having to say you're sorry.
The current boom began, as far as I can tell, with iPods, which created an instant market of voracious teens who wanted nothing more than to buy songs their parents had never heard of. A gift card from the iTunes store was in fact the perfect gift; every time a kid cranked up The Killers, they thought, if only for an instant, that their parents were not total numbskulls.
Gift-cards from bookstores, from clothing retailers, from spas were nice solutions for long-distance friends, at least in the era before free-shipping equalized everything from a gift card to an oversized dog bed. They were a good hedge gift when the bearer didn't really know the recipient well; if you were meeting your college roommate's second spouse for the first time at Christmas, a Barnes & Noble card was a safe bet. And college freshmen seem to like them because autonomy matters more than almost anything.
So retailers have stepped forward with an array of ever more liberating gift cards - ones you can spend anywhere in an entire shopping mall, on anything from dinner and a movie to some much-needed new socks. You can give an eBay card, so that a friend can spend her time bidding on a coveted designer handbag, NWT, and lose out, and try again. More freedom still? Have Santa's little elves leave a deck of credit-card gift cards, loaded with a pre-set spending limit and useable wherever you'd use a regular credit card. One could, I suppose, pay the last installment on that root canal with a Christmas Visa card. If that doesn't seem very festive, you haven't seen what a root canal costs these days.
But as Janis Joplin once sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Gift cards rob us of all the memories, good and bad, that make holidays holidays. That ugly sweater's only value may be in the funny story you get to tell every year at this time, but tell the truth: What's the best present you ever got? I'm willing to bet it wasn't a gift card. I bet it was a real gift from someone you loved, even it if wasn't exactly what you thought you wanted. One year my sister and I saved our lawn-raking money and bought our parents an amazingly ugly glass clown; I can attest to its ugliness because it still stands in an honored location in my mom's house. My husband and I own a set of throw pillows that we never would have picked out ourselves, but they were a gift from a couple who knew us, knew our couch, an. knew that we needed more lumbar support than we were getting.
As for truly great gifts, there's nothing better. Every time I make myself a pot of tea in my white teapot, I imagine my husband and my daughter conspiring to endorse my newfound interest in tea. If I ever get past salutations and weather reports in Italian, it will be because they bought me the language software that will help me get there. A well-chosen gift is the bearer's attempt to honor the things that make the recipient who he or she is, and it requires reflection, affection, and not a little bit of time. A gift card is convenient and generic.
Kind of like the difference between a wonderful home-cooked breakfast and a Hot Pocket, if you ask me.
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