Do Grandparents Overdo Gifts?

Are you spoiling your grandkids with expensive gifts?

Dec 7, 2006

It's fun to buy when you have the budget, but are parents resenting what you do?

A young mother is registering her child at Amazon.com so people can buy the child the right gift. for the holidays She's hoping for electronic toys and ride ons and computer gadgets. Her daughter is less than a year old.

And she'll likely get some of those gifts at a time when the baby would rather explore the boxes they came in.

Then there are the parents who want to yell, "STOP it!"

They have no space for huge electric ride-on toys grandma and grandpa give them. They have no desire to see their children learn that any holiday is a harbinger of loot instead of a time to celebrate our relationships with other people.

In a Minnesota paper's op/ed section this week, a father lamented that grandparents go overboard. Parents can't find a good explanation for the value of holidays when the kids are so distracted with glitter, lighted diodes, buzzing electronics and inflated price tags.

Open any publication during this winter giving season and you'll find pages upon pages of ads for expensive things we might never think of acquiring for ourselves, our grandkids or anyone else, at another time of the year. Why now?

Is it because we fear the other side of the family will out-give us? Ok, maybe they will. But they can't out-love, can they?

Do we get nutsy at Christmas because we're caught up in the swing of things and just carried along? That's where I think the root of it all is. When I was a kid, my mom had a bright orange, brittle plastic 78 rpm recording of a guy named Yogi Yorgeson singing "I Yust Go Nutz at Christmas."

Bright and peppy at first, it got a bit frantic toward the end as the comedy-singer chronicled his need to go overboard for the holidays. Thinking back on that, it starts to look clear to me that extravagance isn't new to the 21st Century. Americans, especially, have tended to over-do for a long time.

And my family isn't in the clear, either. When my 28-year old son was about 4 or 5, I found him crying into his pillow a few weeks before Christmas. He had his piggy bank money scattered around in his blankets like Robert Louis Stevenson's soldiers in the counterpane of poetry. After I soothed him, we got to the root of the concern.

"I want to be able to buy something for grandma," he said. I thought that was a very sweet thought, until he explained that he felt obligated because grandma, in his estimation, had so little money but bought present upon present for 12 grandchildren and 4 children and her children's spouses.

As he hiccupped out this explanation, I felt like that amount of pressure shouldn't fall on a kid.

We talked more about the concept of money and giving and holidays. I don't know what affect, if any, it had on his life.

I do know that his grandma, while not fabulously wealthy, has enough, along with charge cards, I guess, to squeak by with her need to spoil everyone. But there's no reason for any of us to do that.

We send a shabby message. We demonstrate to our loved ones, perhaps, that unable to fill their hearts with high self-esteem and warm feelings of love, we fill their homes with stuff.

A few years ago, my husband and I determined to find a way to express ourselves in the gifts we bought and make them personal for the receiver. We buy books, now. We spend a good amount of time finding beautiful or fascinating books that match our family members' personalities. We also quietly put a little cash in bank accounts for the grandkids. Whatever we can afford. We don't announce that because we don't want to.

It's working. We love the shopping for books because we love books. We like the reactions of the people who get the books. Usually. We feel like we've done something that works for us, sends the message we prefer to send, and encourages our loved ones to enjoy something of beauty they might not have found on their own.

We're not thinking we're some icons of the true meaning of Christmas -- we had many motives for making a change, some selfish. But see what happens if one year you slow it all way down and do something unexpected.

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