Please don’t give me any more Christmas presents

There are all sorts of signs that society is starting to see you as a real adult. Sometimes, people of the age you still have in mind (22 and a half) greet you in the smoking room of a nightclub, you get four wedding announcements and three birth announcements in a week. In my experience, however, The most effective indicator of whether you have passed the adulthood barrier is Christmas panic.

Let’s face it: receiving Christmas presents is a privilege, especially in this period in which inflation is causing prices to rise faster than wages. But if I write these lines, it’s not so much out of ingratitude as out of love: please, for the next few years, don’t give me Christmas presents.

Year-end panic, this ritual

As a child I looked forward to Christmas to meet the whole family, have dinner by candlelight and especially for the presents to unwrap in the morning. Growing up I also learned to appreciate the six hours at the table, the particular care that can be put into the preparation of the meal, e the joy of giving carefully chosen gifts to his family members.

But now, I’m 30, and after 10 years on the donor or donor team, I have to say : I can not stand it anymore.

Every year since November 1, we’ve been told that Christmas is coming and it’s time to think about presents. On November 1, I’m trying to recover the overdraft caused by the summer holidays and I tell myself that there’s still time.

Then I blink and it’s December 10th. From there, it’s chaos. Every weekend I get constant messages and phone calls to find out where I’ll be on the 24th, 25th, 26th, where my boyfriend will be, if we’ll be together. They call me to ask me if he would prefer a blue sweater or a green sweater, if I arrive by train or by car and above all what would make me happy. And with each call, believe me, my interlocutors are far from breathing the magic and joy of Christmas: they seem rather on the edge of the nervous breakdown.

Don’t offer me things (I live in a chicken coop)

We always dream of providing personalized, special and thoughtful gifts to each of our loved ones. In practice, between Secret Santa work, Christmas dinner with friends and the laziness of such short days in this period of the year people around me always end up in busy malls on the weekend before Christmasscouring FNAC and UNIQLO for a trinket they like.

It’s normal ? Sure, it’s the most practical thing to do when you have an afternoon to spare find 30 gifts to distribute over four generations. Does the H&M sweater that I will be offered match my values, me avoiding shopping malls, fast-fashion and brands suspected of exploiting the Uyghur people? A little less. And, even if I appreciate the gesture, it must be said: after ten years of “adult gifts”, i will never need a scarf or a hat again in my life.

Above all (this may seem strange to the generations that preceded me), despite my canonical age, I live in a chicken coop that I rent for almost half my salary. Blame it on a saturated and unregulated real estate market in the only corner of France where I can find a job that more or less matches my studies.

My parents didn’t have the good taste to have sufficient assets to give me a large advance on the inheritance, so much so that they tell you that I took a liking to the minimalism of the furniture: in the two-room apartment where I live, every object must be small and functional. Nothing can make me happy if it clutters up my little living space, especially since I can neither sell it nor give it away out of guilt. At this point, I have two drawers dedicated solely to Christmas gift dressing and it’s physically impossible for me to add an extra cubic inch. Please don’t make me switch careers so I can stock up on patterned socks.

Don’t worry about the money

So certainly there are not only material gifts in life. Some relatives understood my requests for help (Mum, sorry for yelling “Above all not” when you showed me a three cubic meter pod coffee machine) and started giving me intangible gifts. An e-book, a venue for a show are all precious attentions that cannot be unpacked under the tree.

But I’m not going to tell you anything by saying that New Year’s Eve isn’t just a source of logistical stress, it can be a source of financial stress as well. For playing the role of the unemployed cousin who shows up at the family party without presents, I can tell you that she’s not nice: I ended the evening with a knot in my stomach that was difficult to manage. You will answer me, rightly, that gifts don’t necessarily have to be expensive: we can also offer homemade or recycled things. But making presents by hand for a dozen people at Christmas, it requires time, energy and raw materials that many temporary workers do not have. So, let’s cancel everything: don’t offer me anything!

I don’t want to cost you mental load

After a decade of practicing end-of-year celebrations as an adult, I realized one thing: Christmas, and especially gifts, survive on the already immense mental load women carry. Whatever gift a man gives you, don’t be fooled: it was probably chosen, bought or even taken by his mother, his girlfriend or his roommate.

So, to all of you who want to make me happy this Christmas, take the 30-40 minutes you would have spent wondering if I need a fleece handkerchief (no), or puzzling over my tastes in literature, and keep them to yourself. Take a nap, drink some tea or piss off your boyfriend/brother/boss who asks you what to get his mom: this is the Christmas spirit I wish for 2023.

Cover photo credit: Clint Patterson