I’m wondering if we’ve lost the ability to give – because we spend so much time receiving. For many families today, children get whatever they want, whenever they want it. Adults do too, it seems. If they need something, they purchase it. If they see something they like, they take it home. If they have a whim, they follow it…to the store and back home again. A friend at work said that his wife is really difficult to buy for because she buys herself everything she wants. He asked her to put a moratorium on purchasing for at least a month before Christmas, to give him a chance to buy her a gift. Another friend said she doesn’t know what to get her kids. She’s already bought them, along the way, everything they need or want.

While receiving has become constant, giving has become too easy. It’s become transactional. Giving used to require actual effort. We made our lists of people to buy for. We got in the car and drove distances to shop. We went store-to-store in order to find just the right gift. All of this work meant that not only were we expending effort in order to give, but we were thinking of and considering that person(s) for the whole of the process. Today, I can order online with the click of a button. I can seemingly buy any gift card under the sun at my nearby Walgreens. This means I don’t even have to go to that certain store to get it. And while a gift card is always the perfect size and color, isn’t it really just like giving cash? Will our holiday gift-giving eventually just devolve into the exchange of money? If I give you gift cards worth $25 and you do the same for me, what’s the difference if we just exchange cash or simply transfer funds into each other’s accounts? And if it’s the same amount anyway, we might as well not exchange gifts at all, right?

If it’s the thought that counts, then how do we wrap up thoughts and put them under the tree? It seems our materialist culture is running into our convenience culture. We want stuff. We want to give stuff. We want to wrap up good stuff and put it under the tree. We want to see people open stuff up. I guess all that stuff is really the stuff of love. Each of those things is a tangible way for us to have said we care. Someone said that the most important things in life are not things at all. They are love or hope or faith or belief. They are joy and they are wonder. They are relationships.

Change your thinking, change your life, they also say. So here’s how I’m going to reframe: Maybe our culture of convenience, in which it’s less about the physical/mental effort to buy, actually moves us closer to the intangibles of love and all that other goodness? Maybe our culture of receiving, in which we have all we want at every moment, is an experience of undying love – a love that is always present (pun intended)? These feel like a stretch, but I’m going to give them a try.