Thanks for the excellent quotes, SM. I enjoyed reading both the original article and the response (perhaps because I'm celebrating another Christmas in Iceland this year--where the official name is still "jól" (from yule) and they have 13 naughty yule-lads, no Santas to speak of--still very pagan, if you ask me.
Now, as for this...
Quote:
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Originally Posted by SecretMethod70
If you want to be smart and not spend a ton of money on gifts, go ahead and do so. Spread the word of simple gifts if you want, so long as it's not done with righteous indignation. But if people want to max out their credit cards buying all the latest toys for all the kids in their family, even though you've politely suggested that there's another way to celebrate...let them. It doesn't make your Christmas any worse.
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Maybe this is a sidenote, but I don't know how to do this. Ktspktsp and I were planning to buy very few gifts (only individual ones for our small nuclear families, and a general gift for each important extended-family... no kid gifts, etc). Sounds all well and good, I was pretty happy with the situation.
But I just heard that one of my aunt's families is doing the maxing-out-credit-cards thing, and she named about 30 people she is buying gifts for (mind you, I have 32 first cousins in Iceland alone). I told her very clearly to NOT BUY US GIFTS, though I felt maybe I was being too blunt... and she said quietly that she was going to give us something before we went to Lebanon. Well, GREAT. So now that means I will look like an asshole if I don't give something back to her, right? (Her and her 4 children, christ). I am not trying to be righteously indignant here, I just want to know what the right thing to do is. Just give her the card we originally planned to send, and accept her gift and leave? Is that polite?
Other than between my husband and I (where I feel like we have very healthy and clear expectations of gifts, due to our massive amounts of communication), I would really prefer to just stop participating in Christmas and birthday gift exchanges. I fucking hate this rigamarole, especially when everyone we know is affluent enough to buy whatever they want, most of the time.