Gift Nation

Gift Nation

There are gifts for all occasions and the mighty American economic machine continues to convince mind numbed Americans they need to buy each other meaningless material objects. It starts from the time we are born. Parents, family and friends buy kids all kinds of gifts! Some useful to someone trying to raise a child in a two income family which is barely enough these days, but the gifts are mostly toys, hunks of plastic soon to be forgotten as the box it came in is much more interesting for a child to play with. It is the adults who instill and teach children they need these material objects and it continues to get worse generation to generation.
We all feel the pressure and obligation to gift, yet none of us really want to practice this ridiculous societal ritual. First there is the birthday. We need to stop gifting birthdays right about the time we can drink legally. Just buy me a beer if you really feel obligated to acknowledge I have reached another year closer to death. Then we have these people who get married. Women have, The Shower. The first step to getting gifts you don’t really need. And after you buy the bride to be her Nick Knacks and Pasta Maker for her shower, you have to go to her wedding and gift her again! Some genius figured out how to get two expensive junk presents for one occasion. So you struggled to find a Shower gift, but now you have to really work to find a wedding gift. So you buy the first piece of crap appliance you see when you walk into Wal-Mart! This is probably why most sit on people’s basement shelf the rest of their married life! Seriously, who uses a bread maker? And somewhere along the way some marketing guru came up with the wedding registry. Don’t know what useless appliance to buy us? Well now we will tell you! What a novel idea! And then you are sitting at the wedding and you know this couple will not last a year. And don’t forget the cash you dropped at their Bachelor or Bacholette party. At least the fellas got it right. Dropping a $100.00 bucks to see naked girls humiliate your buddy and watch him drink until he pukes is well worth the expense, but that damn Waffle Maker, I will never use it.

I am calling for an all out end to Gifts. It’s too much and it’s out of control. What are you people doing? You are busy buying each other useless meaningless shit. And then you are re-gifting it. Come on, we all know it. You give the piece of crap gift you got for your wedding to someone else. Why don’t we all shit in a bag and just put it in each other’s basements. What is the difference? Well, the American corporations won’t like that. We need to keep buying the shit they put before us everyday! At what point does your life suck so bad that things take the place of experience, friends, good memories and a sense of reality.

So I beg of my friends don’t buy me birthday presents that sit and collect dust, because I am not buying them for you anymore. If you graduate from something I may give you 50 bucks, but in reality graduating high school is not a major accomplishment, anyone who shows up can do it; I did. College does deserve a small gift of money we all know how expensive this scam is, but that is for another article. If you get married, great for you for following life’s gifting plan. You think to yourself, “I graduated college how can I get more gifts….marriage?” I was thinking of finding someone to marry me for the gifts, then we can get it annulled and split everything 50/50. Then when I think of the divorce rate in this country, maybe some have already figured this out! So after you are married how can someone get even more gifts? Have a baby. Of course! But you soon find out once the baby is born the gifts are no longer for you, but all for the baby. And once again you are left with a pile of shit, literally.

So what am I ranting about? I am begging all intelligent humans to end the gift saga. Stop buying each other useless pieces of shit. If you are out and see something that you know a friend or loved one would really love or appreciate, by all means gift them! But we need to stop gifting multiple times a year because we feel we have to. Don’t give in to societal gifting peer pressure. Just think of the time we would save not having to stress over what we are going to buy someone we don’t even like. So I say NO MORE GIFTS! Or I’m going to have to get a bigger place to store all my shit.