Tasha Dhanraj and the reality of gift buying

December is all about the stress of buying Christmas presents. I hate it so much that for lots of my friends my festive gift to them is that I’m not getting them one at all, therefore they no longer have to feel obligated to buy a present for me.

One advantage to being in education is that I can avoid my friends for a week before and after Christmas due to the holidays. However, I come from a very close-knit family. Somehow, exposure to my family is even more highly concentrated around the festive period, which means I am supposed to get everyone presents.

“Children under 12 aren’t going to want anything useful”

My grandma was very good at breeding. She had eight children. Of those eight children, six of them have reproduced. Add them to my dad’s side of the family and I’ve got about 30 cousins. Now some of my more selfish cousins have started to reproduce. I simply do not have the funds to provide gifts for all these people. There’s only one way to get Christmas presents without losing all my savings: pick favourites.

Automatically, all children under the age of 12 are eradicated from the calculations. I have several reasons for this. Firstly, under 12 they aren’t going to want anything useful and they’ll just forget they ever got it by next year.

Secondly, I don’t like children under 12. I don’t want them to get a false idea about how I view them and think they have a hope of getting amicable responses from me for the other 364 days of the year. This eradicates about 40 per cent of my cousins. The rest of my cousins can get bath bombs from Lush.

Unfortunately, despite my attempts to remove the
need to buy my friends presents, I appear to have acquired a different kind of friend in time for Christmas this year. A male friend.

Suddenly I feel overcome with the need to spend more money on him than any other person in my life. It is sickening. I have spent stupid amounts of money buying things for him that bear some twee, awful in-joke, wrapped in sentimentality and adorable vomit. He has completely undermined all my previous rules about buying Christmas presents and at this early stage of our courtship I can’t be sure if he’s even worth it.

I know it is the season of giving, but I better get as good as I give or next year I will spend the whole of December bumbling around Churchill Square muttering “bah humbug!”