Every year I tell myself I’m going to make homemade gifts for Christmas. Before I know it Christmas is a week away and I haven’t carved out any time on my schedule to make said gifts. The week before Christmas is always a mad dash to get gifts so I don’t end up leaving my family and friends high and dry on Christmas day.

My poor planning makes Christmas the most stressful time of the year.

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Walking through Georgetown in the midst of my Hail Mary Christmas shopping bonanza I thought to myself: what is the most precious gift I could give someone for Christmas?

Time.

Time is the one thing we are always running out of. Who wouldn’t want a gift of time for Christmas?

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 Whether you agree with me or not, Christmas as we know it is a commercial holiday. It’s how retail giants market their wares to you and I in order to end the calendar year in the black. Retail Christmas ensnares us so that we feel socially obligated to provide a loved one with a physical gift on December 25^th.

Commercially bought gifts are what we get people when we’ve run out of time. Christmas shopping is kind of like housekeeping, dry cleaning, and childcare. We outsource parts of our lives because we don’t have time to care about the possessions and people we love. And this is what Christmas has become. We Amazon Prime our way through the season because there isn’t enough time. Instead of carefully choosing a gift for a loved one we let Google algorithms do it for us.

What’s ironic about this commercial holiday is that it ends up costing us more time in the long run. Americans finance hundreds of dollars on Christmas gift giving every year. No, we don’t spend hundreds of dollars on Christmas, we finance hundreds of dollars on it.

Our Christmas purchases are made on credit where we spend the following months paying off that debt. In the long-term we trade time working overtime or a part-time job just to pay down our holiday debts. Less obvious is the time spent worrying about our busted budgets and financial woes into the start of the new year.

In an effort to save time and appease the retail gods, we end up wasting more of it.

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Walking down M Street, gawking at the carefully curated window displays, I realized non-commercial, homemade gifts are the gift of time.

When you make someone a gift for Christmas, you have to plan for it. You have to figure out what you are going to make and what supplies you need. You go to the store to acquire those supplies. You carve out time on your schedule to make said gift. 

You take your time and give it to someone else in the gift creating/giving process. You know what this gift communicates to the recipient? You are worth my time.

You my dear and beloved friend, you are worth my time.

What a gift.

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Giving up time for the sake of another, isn’t that the meaning of Christmas? Selflessness in the face of selfishness. Isn’t that the story of Saint Nick? A man who selflessly took on the burden of ensuring every child had a toy. Or even the birth of Jesus Christ? The selfless act of Mary and Joseph to travel on donkey and give birth to the savior of the world in a filthy manger.

Another Christmas is here and I didn’t make homemade Christmas presents. But what bothers me the most is not the usual stress of running out of time to purchase gifts; it’s the realization I didn’t set aside the time to plan for my gifts.

To avoid repeating this annual blunder I’ve done the only rational thing a Millennial can do: set an appointment on my Google Calendar. So, I’ll be at Slipstream at 10am on Saturday, October 6, 2018 to plan my Christmas 2018 gift making strategy.

Until then, Merry Christmas friends.