Presents

I received an interesting gift today.

When I logged in to start my work today, I received an almost immediate message from a friend. The note read that because he didn’t have a tree on which to hang the ornament I’d sent him a few weeks before, he decided to take a walk and find a nice tree for it.

Which just happened to be on top of a mountain.

These are the sorts of presents I enjoy most: the intangible things that connect people. The ideas that are shared, the thought that goes into an act, the inside things shared among friends. Things that won’t mean anything to anyone outside of a select handful of people, and to those people it means everything. Sometimes there might be a tangible something used to help make those points – drawings made by young children come to mind – but the real gift, the underlying point that the tangible represents, is something different. The gift that child is giving when they hand over their drawing isn’t the drawing itself; the gift is the time and thought and love that goes into doing something uniquely for the recipient.

I think this is why I often have a hard time when thinking on physical presents. When we had our friends Sam and Petra on On Tap at the beginning of December, one of the questions Petra asked was what we were hoping to find under the tree Christmas morning. All three of us regular panelists had a hard time answering it (though Killer at least had a list of things he’ll need for his new house). We had the same problem while we were getting ready to interview Santa a few weeks later, and the more I thought about it, we had it months before when we talked about birthdays as well. What we talked about then was that as we got older, the meaning of a gift changes to the recipient – what was important wasn’t the gift itself, but the motivations behind it. When we were kids, Christmas and birthday gifts were a way of receiving things we wanted but couldn’t ordinarily have; as thirty-somethings, our wants are covered by our paychecks (yay adulting). If something we saw in a store does or doesn’t show up under the tree that we had our eye on, it doesn’t matter, because the items we really want we can go and get ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of tangible presents under the tree that are very nice. The General got me a bathtub spa bubble mat which is nothing short of amazing, I’ve been geeking out coloring fractals and tessellations from Alex Bello’s math coloring book Patterns of the Universe (one of the few things I did actually request this year), and the tablet Scott got me is on its way to becoming a portal of productivity. But my favorite presents this year were definitely the kind that couldn’t be wrapped up in a box: the late-night conversations, the encouragement when I needed it most, the opportunity to grow and explore in an environment that supported my endeavors. The best ones included friends driving halfway across the country just to spend time with me, having tea with me from thousands of miles away, staying up to talk or play games into the wee hours of the morning for no better reason than it had been a rough day, and making damn sure I know the difference I make, even when I don’t see it.

These are the gifts that are the most meaningful, even if you have to climb a mountain to get them.