So uploading videos of you giving your kids crap gifts is a thing now? Please. PLEASE. People, my parents are the hipsters of crap gifts: they were doing it WAY before it was cool. And man were they good at it--your half-eaten baloney sandwich is great and all, but, grasshopper, you have much to learn.
Not to say every gift was horrible--the stunningly out-of-left-field bagpipe chanter remains the Greatest Unasked-For Gift in history. But in our house Christmas was always a time of year for brilliant psychological warfare.
There's a fine line between a gag gift--haha an old banana!--and a gift that says, in no uncertain terms, "we neither know you as a person nor do we care to, and we don't think money would have expressed that as clearly."
The trick to crap gifts is to really stick the landing--never, ever admit that what you've given is in any way less than the perfect gift. Tell your dissappointed recipient that they just don't know how much they actually do like it. Double down if need be: how shrilly can you scream that your ungrateful child has ruined christmas by hating the oversized sweater in the color she's loathed since childhood?
Have you been having a hard time adjusting to college because we forbade you from majoring in theater, and so you feel like the only thing that really made you happy is forever beyond your reach? Here's a commemoration of your last stage role ever, from a year ago, in ceramic doll form! Stop crying.
Your children will eventually figure you out and become award-worthy actors (ha!), excited about everything. Draw them out:
A gold bracelet! It's so nice!
You don't like it.
Yes I do!
No you don't you haven't worn gold since you were twelve.
Then why did you--
HOW DARE YOU be ungrateful we spent money on that!
But even having mastered that, can you really go in for the long haul? After months have passed, on a random night when your children are slow to eat their peas, will you be able to storm up to their rooms, grab the abhorred gifts that you've guilted them into keeping from their places of shame at the back of the closet, throw them in a trash bag and threaten to give them to Poor Kids Who Also Love Peas? Thus achieving the piece de resistance, forcing them to cling to the very thing they shoved as far away from themselves as possible? [Why was it always Poor Kids? How did I not become Republican with all the threats to redistribute my wealth?]
Can you also work in a threat to euthanize their puppy?
Because only then can you step to the OG's.
THAT WAS HILARIOUS
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