Yuletide Kitsch

Maybe it’s nobler to give than to receive, but, let’s face it, buying presents is an ordeal. For me, it always has been. Even as a tiny child, I felt tortured by gift-buying anxiety at holiday time. I’d stand in the drugstore, $2.47 clutched in my sweaty hand, wracked by spasms of ambivalence over what to get my mother. The Teflon-treated spatula was clearly the practical choice, and such a bargain at $1.09. But who could resist the mauve ceramic cup, the one covered in pink roses and insistent black letters, which would assure my mother, with each serving of coffee, that she was, indeed, a #1 MOM!

Time hasn’t lessened my anxiety. At this time of year, I still circle the shops like a tortured animal, agonizing over what to entrap and drag home for the family.

For all the doubt and misery that goes into shopping for loved ones, there is a single category of giving at which I excel. It turns out I’m an expert in choosing goofy gifts. You know the ones, those revolting, dopey, but sort of clever items you bring to office parties and joke-gift exchanges?

While I’ll admit this isn’t a skill up there with advanced biomedical or thermonuclear research, I do take pride in being one of the best in this rather rarefied field. While nearly anyone can find a bad or just plain ugly gift, it takes a certain talent to find one that has the right balance of kitsch, humor and genuine usefulness. The best gift is the one that half the guests would kill to have, while the other half would pay to get rid of it.

Take, for instance, pink plastic flamingos, which will divide any group along aesthetic as well as generational lines. Tasteful boomers will recoil at the sight of the things, while teens and Gen-Xers will form a mosh pit and fight over them.

Then there is glow-in-the-dark Space Mucous, which my friend and colleague Doug, another expert in kitschy gifts, assures me is appropriate for any and all occasions.

My finest hour came the year my husband and I brought a footstool to the house of our friends, Cathy and Roy. Their annual Christmas bash and white-elephant exchange is always a raucous and irreverent affair--bad and competitive behavior being fueled, as it can be, by highly seasoned food and too much wine. Even in such an atmosphere, the contest over a giant, ugly, white plaster-of-Paris foot tucked below a dainty, red, plush seat triggered a cause celebre that continues to this day. I don’t believe that Wanda will ever really forgive Alexi for beating her out of that stool.

Thanks to the many public relations firms, publishing houses and specialty businesses in America, all bombarding journalists with promotional items during the holiday season, I have a rich cache of goods for today’s Christmas fete. Vermont maple leaf mulch, from a company in Pacific Palisades, should be well received, especially by the gardeners in the group.

But the real winner, I’m sure, will be the hand weights with built-in pepper spray canisters, a gift any fitness- and survival-oriented urbanite would covet.

And this year, I’m going to see to it that Wanda gets these.