Be careful those 'improving' presents aren't re-gifted this Christmas

Many of us will do it once. With any luck we’ll learn to read the social cues and try not to do it again. But some persist with it: Buying people an ‘improving‘ present.

The improving present is one where you spot what you think is an area in the recipient’s life they need to work on, and you try to enable that improvement to take place with the blunt instrument of a Christmas present. Sometimes it’s exactly the catharsis the recipient wants, but more often than not you’re placing a burden on them and they would have been much better off with a voucher.

This often manifests itself in early adulthood (ages 18-38) We can be afflicted with a mania to ‘improve’ their parents.

This mania usually starts when we move out of home and get our first proper job. All through our teenage years, we knew our parents were eejits who needed to be fixed but we lacked the resources to sort them out.

But after a few weeks into our first job, still drunk on praise from first employers who haven’t given us anything meaningful to do and yet to be blamed during a shitestorm, adult children can be convinced of their omniscience.

I have been as guilty of this as anyone. I once went to Granada in southern Spain.

Granada is famous for its Islamic architecture and design. I wanted to strike a pretentious blow for multi-cultural knowledge and diversity. So I bought my parents an ornate Moorish-style teapot. Clearly I must have believed that hitherto, our tea-drinking had been too Eurocentric and parochial.

The problem is, you can’t just bring a new teapot into an Irish house. Once a household has settled on a teapot, that’s it.

And so it was that I came home a few months later to find the Moorish teapot standing forlornly on the sideboard, acting as a receptacle for the kind of items that just doesn’t go anywhere else — three paperclips, an old smoke alarm battery and a used highlighter.

Turns out, the Moors may have brought maths, astronomy and beautiful architecture to an intellectually moribund Europe beset by the dark ages but their knock-off teapots needed more drawing-board. The teapot leaked from the lid.

I should have given them licence to regift it.

Regifting is the process of moving around a gift that no one wants until eventually it ends up in Oxfam. The next time you receive a large china fruit bowl from a jack-the-lad ‘ledgebag’ who normally owns one cup and one spoon, a bottle of auld lads-ish whiskey from a non-drinker or a single odd kitchen utensil — something expensive from Newbridge Silverware, a toothpick carousel or a yoke for keeping a buttery knife off the table — just accept with grace and begin thinking about who will be the next in line.

The person who normally best combines altruism and perceptive present buying is, of course, Santa. This is a tough year on Santa. Years of recession meant huge layoffs at the North Pole and his workforce hollowed out. Suddenly, everyone has money again and somehow Santa has to ramp up production when all his elves have moved on to work elsewhere in call centres.

Santa was fairly predictable when it came to my childhood — a different teddy bear each year was welcomed into the extended furry family. Apart from one year when Santa got a bit confused and presented me with a stuffed bunny called Angeline who wore a dress. I was an equal opportunities employer so Angeline was treated no differently.

The error obviously bothered Santa because, the following year, when delivering a Dunnes jumper, he wrote back to explain how he didn’t always get it right. His handwriting was shaky, which was understandable, He’d had a long journey and this was back in the 1980s before all the bypasses were built.

That’s all ahead of us. This year we’ve gladly given ourselves the ultimate ‘improving present’. And she won’t be regifted!