Perfect gifts come from the most unlikely pincodes

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. This is not a gift guide. Though I love them and would find life very hard without them.

If anything, this is a gift post-mortem—an examination of the corpse of our gifting good intentions. The universe holds many gift-giving personality types. Many of us know gift-givers who give us expensive, iridescent gifts that are awful.

Their awfulness is of a special variety that they are too ugly to be ornamental and too ornamental to be useful. A seven-layer diya holder in royal purple with a mirrored base that is as tall as a two-year-old, for instance. If you think this is highly specific and based on a gift I was given, you are mistaken.

This is just an example of the kind of gift you could receive and spend a corresponding two years to re-gift. You may conclude that the kind of person who gives these gifts is simultaneously tasteless and thoughtless. But that isn’t true.

Sure, you may get such a gift in the mass-distribution moments of festival seasons or weddings. However, the person who customarily gives this kind of terrifying gift can be sweet and well-intentioned. And there lies the problem with gift-giving.

When you give one, you are hoping that the person who gets it understands what you intended. When you get one, you are trying to X-ray the box and arrive at a cardiac reading. What lay in the red heart that wrapped this gift in pink? And then in this universe are the great gift-givers.

I have an aunt by marriage who gives the best gifts. On my kid’s first birthday, she gave him a toy that he played with till he was 4. She gave me leggings that five years in still get me compliments.