The gift of giving

Last night as we were driving home from our slightly belated anniversary dinner* we somehow got on the subject of presents. It wasn't because of our anniversary, because honestly we don't really get each other gifts for that pretty much ever. I think we were talking about his birthday which is in two weeks.

Anyways, I was mentioning something about having gotten him his gifts already and he began to pout. Not because I had gotten him gifts, but more because I always get him cool gifts and he is lucky if he can manage to pick something off of my Amazon list. While this is true, I have never minded. I have an Amazon list for just such reasons.

The thing is though, he is right. I am pretty awesome at giving gifts. It is like some sort of super power I possess. I can always seem to manage to find something heartfelt, cool, unique, or all of the above. Now I do have my share of truly generic gift givings, but really one or two awesome gifts buys you more than a few DVD birthdays.

I will give a few examples of my gift giving-foo in case you don't believe me.

One year for Christmas I bought the husbeast a record. Yes an actual record. This was not any ordinary record though. No, this was a copy of one of his grandfathers records. I wrote an entire post about this at one point. It was super awesome because he had never heard his grandfather's music before.

Last year for his birthday I bought the husbeast a beautiful top of the line bowler hat all the way from England. He loves that sort of thing, I mean seriously loves it. He squeed when he saw it.

I have a couple of other examples that come to mind, but I don't want to say them because they are all gifts that are being given this year. I don't want to spoil the surprise after all.

I guess I am really just good at it because I pay attention. I am always quietly sitting in the background listening and watching. I hear when people make off handed comments about things they adored in childhood, or things that they think are amazing. Or just getting to know someone well enough that I know what sort of things would really be the perfect thing for them.

Really when it comes down to it though, I love giving gifts. I truly love the act of gift giving. The perfect gift and the way a person reacts is the best thing in the world. Seeing their eyes light up and the look of genuine awe and joy on their faces makes everything so incredibly worth the time and effort it took to figure out what to get and to find it.


*The husbeast came down with a stomach virus Monday night and was completely unfit for going out on our anniversary, so we delayed it for a day.