There's this commercial I just hate--Mazda, I think--where the guy's narrating about how he wants a car, and then he finds one, and it "has all this STUFF...and then I see another car, and it has all this other STUFF" too. It's a very irritating commercial mainly because it reminds me of my husband's cousin, a six-year-old who still believes in Santa and thinks the world should get him presents at Christmas (by all accounts, a very spoiled child). For this little boy, like the guy narrating the commercial, it's all about getting the stuff.
I sat and watched my inlaws open presents both on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas day. It was all about the stuff: Lego sets for the kids, expensive scarves and jewelry for the women, wine paraphenalia for the men, DVDs by the boxful for everyone, and somewhere in there, a 4 or 5 carat diamond ring. I fully admit that I was on the receiving end of some of this stuff. I can't tell you how much I appreciate their generosity: They've accepted me and they tolerate me pretty well. Ditto them. I doubt there are many other people lucky enough to marry into a family like this.
But it bothers me how much their love shows with stuff, and not words. I've never heard any of them tell each other that they love them; I've seldom even heard them say anything good about each other. Rarely are they complimentary about anything except the food, and the one sister-in-law who's married in, like me, gets ridiculed (jokingly) for being nice.
H and I, you might know, just went through a long period of unemployment. We worked temp jobs and the ends met, but they weren't exactly overlapping. We couldn't really afford to buy presents for all the kids, as we were expected to do, so we took them out the day after Christmas to someone else's house and played games and actually had a great time. It was our present to them, lame as it may be.
And when it was over, the 6-year-old came up to my husband and I and asked, with big doe-eyes, why we hadn't gotten him a present. And then he cried.
I'm trying really hard to remember what it was like to be 6 years old. Maybe I wanted all the stuff, too. Probably. I'd like to think not, though.
The stuff we always got as children was practical: sweaters, shirts, pants--there was even a year when my gift to my sister was a package of socks, which I individually wrapped and made her hunt the tree for. Or the time my brother gave my dad a dry fly for fishing in an old refridgerator box. And I still don't get out the dental floss container without thinking of getting it every year in my stocking with a toothbrush.
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In the end, I would rather hear one nice thing about me from my in-laws than get a million pairs of earrings. (On the flip side, no one wants to give just a compliment for Christmas, but I can be flexible: I'd take a compliment in addition to a pretty pair of cheap-o earrings, if that was okay, too.)
On my subjective scale, substance outweighs stuff any day. Call me Scrooge or practical or inconsiderate (and I try not to be inconsiderate or Scrooge-like), but I don't need all the stuff. I'm not buying a Mazda any time soon.
