I liked Christmas better when I shopped for it, when I hid boxes in closets, when I hauled out rolls of wrapping paper and boxes of bows and ribbons and sat down while the kids were sleeping and turned the mishmash of stuff into a gleaming pile of holiday jolly.
This year, here’s what my 13-year-old daughter is dreaming of, in addition to a white Christmas: a bunch of plastic cards. I’ll buy them online, stick them in envelopes, and pass ’em over.
Oh, the joy.
Gift cards have been around since the early 1990s when Blockbuster Entertainment, the now-bankrupt video-store chain, started using them instead of paper gift certificates that were being counterfeited.
Now nearly everybody hawks the little slips of magnetic-stripped plastic. My daughter’s list of card-requests reads like the directory of your local mall: Forever 21, Aéropostale, AMC Theatres, Bath and Body Works, Hollister, Chipotle.
She adores them the way I thrilled to books and jeans and albums and board games, back in 1978 when I was 13 and presents were the only option.
The things are widespread because a lot of people — not just 13-year-old girls — desire them. This year marks the fifth in a row in which cards are the most-requested holiday gift, according to the National Retail Federation, an industry trade group in Washington. The organization predicts the average shopper this season will spend $155.43 on cards, racking up $27.8 billion in sales.
That’s a lot of Starbucks gingerbread lattes and Old Navy snowflake-patterned sweaters.
But listen, it’s also a sound: the whoosh of millions of enthusiasms evacuating a month formerly gauzed in merry.
Of the accumulated billions of gift card exchanges during the past two decades, has a single bestower ever studied the face of the person tearing open the logo-emblazoned sleeve, waiting for the first flicker of surprise and glee?
This has never happened.
The synthetic rectangles have their appeals, most notably convenience. What else are you going to send that teenage nephew who lives on the other side of the country and whom you haven’t seen in a year?
But I resist the idea of spending the morning of Dec. 25, gathered around the tree, swaddled in holiday lights and greenery, nodding our heads to Burl Ives belting out “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” inhaling the aroma of popovers rising in the oven (our tradition), and watching my oldest rifle through a few dozen grams of distilled commerce.
The very experience, I fear, could vanquish the popover perfume, replacing it with the stench of Cinnabon. It’s one thing to open boxes filled with mall harvests. But the erasure of the effort? The presentation of a commandment to, simply, go forth and spend?
Has it really come to this?
Maybe I’m being selfish. It’s Christmas. Kids ask for things; parents try their best to please. Nothing would cheer her more than a stack of licenses to stalk FlatIron Crossing.
Recently, as she continued speaking adoringly — almost lovingly — about the prospect of a Christmas bounty she could slide effortlessly into a skinny-jeans front pocket, I wondered if I could find some middle ground.
She wants Urban Outfitters wafers. I want wrapped boxes with real things in them, not a joke: a box the size of a microwave oven holding a gift smaller than the queen of hearts.
Beth Litz, a Boulder mother of an 11- and a 13-year-old, embraces the cards for her kids’ Hanukkah but insists on a mix: some cards, some presents.
“I like them to have the element of surprise,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t think of the gift, but Mom did. It’s kind of hard to ooh and ah over a gift card.”
So she hunts for a few presents she thinks the kids will like, and then fulfills their request for cards, which she leverages for mother-child outings. When her 11-year-old daughter gets an American Girl gift card, the two of them drive the hour south from Boulder to Park Meadows Mall and make a day of it: shopping, lunching, strolling.
Litz also appreciates how gift cards prolong the holiday, in a way: The card arrives in December, but her son may not transform the slice of GameStop, his favorite store, into a video spectacle of swordplay until January or March.
In addition, Litz endorses how card-ownership instills a sense of responsibility in her kids. They don’t buy things impulsively. Instead, they research the things they want, weeding out items that fail to make them giddy or things that sound good, but get bad reviews online.
Gift cards, says Litz, also hedge the volume of holiday waste. Kids use the cards for things they want and that keeps excess stuff out of landfills.
That is the case for my seventh-grader. I’m not sure this is a skill worthy of wild celebration and community veneration, but with gift cards and the money she makes through baby sitting and allowance, she has become a wise shopper. The plastic sends her to the mall; she tends to spend her cash, though, in thrift stores, where Aéropostale hoodies sell for $7 rather than $50.
I have noted, too, how she revels in the independence she gains after a few parent-free hours out in the world with friends. They hang out at coffee shops, duck into different stores, compare outfits. She always returns with good stories, and with a smile.
All of these pro-card arguments build a strong case for the slivers of corporate retail — the reduction of waste, the parent-child excursions, the shouldering of responsibility and the dragged-out holidays and the grins.
But still, I resist.
With great futility.
The girl will get her cards.
But she’ll get presents, too, things my wife and I pick out for her and wrap and place beneath the tree.
At least one aspect of the cards-for-Christmas phenomenon does please me.
That AMC Theatres card? She will pick the movies. But with each film, either mom or dad will be along for the ride. And before the showing, we’ll catch an early dinner.
Now there’s a card-unveiling that might mark a first-ever in human history: It might compel me to study her face, waiting for that first flicker of surprise and, I hope, glee.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
