The Bitterly Honest Gift Guide
Gifts for Kids
Show them the place their college savings should be. Cry a little. Hold each other.
Get them a Slinky! Such a great, classic toy. Use it once. Feel joyous! Then, accidentally put a single kink in that perfectly engineered coil. Spend the rest of your life tormented by the scientific impossibility of ever fixing it, versus the wastefulness of just throwing it away. Can you recycle it? Maybe you should take it the scrap metal place? WHO KNOWS? Remember that one time it worked, though?
Boxes of kittens. If it turns out your kids are allergic to kittens, not a prob! Just give them away! The trauma of getting an adorable baby animal and then immediately having to give it up will be entirely assuaged by the one thing all kids love: big-ass boxes.
Knit something! Get some yarn and some needles or whatever bullshit & get started. Knit all the way through the first 45 minutes of Christmas Vacation. Look down at your progress. Whoops, you forgot to knit. Cast off and call it good. Give your kid $20 instead. Or a hug.
Books Kids Love
- Flossing: YES YOU HAVE TO & NO, YOU DON’T NEED THAT MUCH.
- Picking Your Nose is Gross: One Boy’s Tale of Redemption
- The Case of Actually One-time Please Just Feed the Cats Already
Gifts for Mom
Fold the laundry. FOLD. IT. Then, put it away! Not like: oh hey, I’ll move it from the bed to the chair to the floor and maybe back to the bed again and who knows if it’s even clean or dirty anymore, it’s probably all dirty, I’ll just put it back in the laundry basket. NO. You have to fold it and then put it alllll the way away. Nice try though, kid.
That 23 cents missing from each of our earned dollars. Yeah. That. We want it.
Gifts For Dad
Does he already have ties? He probably does. He either has like 47 and wears two, or he has 2 and wears none. Put all the ties in a box and wrap the box in Family Circus comics. Burn it. Take a photo and post it to Instagram. Tag gift recipient. #HappyHolidays
Get him a huge chainsaw. Remember to also buy him a helmet because he is now 100% more likely to filet his head completely open than he was before you gave him a chainsaw. Important note: Especially and definitely buy your dad/brother/boyfriend a chainsaw if he’s a bearded hipster living in Brooklyn. Cuz it’s ironic.
Gifts for All Humanity
Get some good therapy. Refrain from having opinions until you’ve been to 24 sessions. Then, still don’t have any opinions. Just sit down next to your parent/partner/friend one day and say “I’m so sorry.” Go back for another 24 sessions. Keep going. Never stop going.
Let’s let each other nap! Without guilt. Without shame. Just like, hey how about we take a freaking rest? I know we’re running out of ozone, reasonable politicians, and panda bears, but we still have ALL THE NAPS. We can do this, guys. We can NAP.
Originally published at www.parent.co on December 2, 2015.
