Made It Myself
More of us are making Christmas presents this year than last. Hardly any more of us want one. Dom spent Sunday in the garage finding out what that gap costs.
More of us are making Christmas presents this year than last. Hardly any more of us want one. Dom spent Sunday in the garage finding out what that gap costs.
Dom spent Sunday in the garage with forty dollars of chillies, a box of little jars from Kmart and the roller door pulled half down, like whatever he was doing in there might get out.
Call them Dom and Jess. They're composites, a few people from the open chair at the barber and a bit of my own old form. Together nine years. Two kids, one car, and since winter, one and a half incomes. Dom's hours got cut in July. Nobody at work called it that. They called it a roster change.
So this year Dom is making Christmas. Chilli oil for his side, chilli oil for her side, chilli oil for the Kris Kringle at his mum's, where the cap is fifty dollars and his sister always spends eighty and makes sure you know.
Jess came out with a cup of tea and found him writing names on masking tape. Nan. Uncle Pete. Her dad, who doesn't eat chilli. She didn't mention her dad. She said they looked good. They did look good. That was the problem. They looked like effort, and in that family effort reads like a confession.
This isn't just Dom. Pureprofile's Christmas Report landed last week. It asked 1,015 of us about the season. 15% are planning homemade gifts this year, up from 11% last year. Only 17% are hoping to get one.
Sit with those two numbers. Nearly as many people are making the thing as want it. That gap is a whole Christmas Day. It's the jar going into the pantry behind the stock cubes. It's the thank you that comes a beat too quickly.
I'll own mine before I point at the sister. I've been the one who said "oh, you made this?" in the voice. I once put a hand knitted scarf in a drawer and wore the one from Myer to the same dinner. I told myself I was being practical. I was keeping score and calling the scoreboard taste.
Here's the bit nobody says at the table. A bought gift tells you someone had money. A made one tells you someone had a Sunday, and spent it thinking about you specifically, right down to who doesn't eat chilli. One of those is rarer this year. It isn't the money.
But Dom doesn't want a lecture on meaning. He wants to not be the bloke whose present gets a polite laugh in front of his mum. Pride is expensive. It's the last thing a bloke stops paying for.
Jess knows that. So that night, after the kids were down, she didn't make a speech about how proud she was. She took the jar with her own name on it, opened it, and put a spoonful on her eggs.
It was too hot. She ate it anyway. He watched her from the doorway and didn't say a thing.
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