Tis the season, so to speak.
To be honest I don’t really enjoy Christmas, appreciation of this season requires a level of childlike wonder I no longer find easily accessible within the dusty corners of my cynical mind. I tried to hold onto it for as long as I could but ultimately the well just ran dry. Call me Ms Grinch, I guess.
The one thing in my favour however is that I love buying people presents. It’s curious because I don’t really enjoy receiving presents so much anymore, perhaps because my interests have grown so esoteric that I’m remarkably difficult to buy for. I come from a long line of people who are difficult to buy for, and as such I have picked up a few pointers on how to select a gift for a person you barely know.
It’s all about learning to identify Giftitude
What is Giftitude?
Giftitude is a property of certain items which elevate them above generic everyday items. Perhaps it’s best if I describe my most recent giftitude evaluation.
I was out doing some Christmas shopping for my family, consisting of my brother, his 3 partners and my dad. My dad is easy to buy for because he always wants the same thing, crystallised ginger. It’s his favourite confection, he doesn’t buy it for himself, and he always wants more. Consumable gifts are ideal. I have the same situation with my mum and her love of marzipan fruits².
The shop I buy these things from is a miraculous little store in Bury St Edmunds called Lorford’s. Lorford’s is a tobacconist which faced with plummeting sales in the sector of addictive cancer products diversified into confection and boardgames. Most importantly, their products are oozing with giftitude.
Let’s start with the confection. Sure, I can buy a bag of crystallised ginger from the market, and I’d probably get more for my money, but a scoop of candy in a taped up cellophane bag lacks giftitude. Giftitude of consumables can be measured in fancy printed boxes with gold foiled embellishments and tissue paper interiors.
Of course that won’t help you unless you know your giftee’s particular snack fixation.
Giftitude presents in other ways, which is why the boardgames section upstairs provides such opportunities. It’s worth noting that pretty much everyone I know⁴ enjoys boardgames. My brother and I were part of the same boardgames club in university, shared a lot of the same friends, went to the same parties, which is why it’s so disappointing that since his own marriage I hardly ever see him, nor can I keep up with his interests and desires. I do know however that he loves tabletop games, specifically the kind of esoteric ones which are released by smaller independent publishers.
But wait – I am somehow able to hear you cry in the future, long after this article is published – if we’re barely in touch how do I know if he already has a specific board or card game? He could have purchased it for himself!
And this is again where we look for items with a lot of giftitude, because they form a two pronged attack.
First items with high giftitude tend to be a bit more expensive, a bit more extravagant, and a bit more frivolous than regular products. As such people actually tend not to purchase giftitudinous items for themselves. Buying someone an item which is reasonably generic but has a high giftitude is often a better gambit than buying a targeted gift with low giftitude, because if they want it that much and it lacks giftitude, they’ve probably already got one.
Secondly, if you buy a high giftitude item which they do already have, either because they bought it themselves or someone else had the same idea, it doesn’t matter. High giftitude products suggest a higher degree of effort in the purchase and as such the effort will be appreciated regardless. Indeed with sufficient giftitude you can give someone something they hate but they can’t really be disappointed or annoyed because the offering has sufficient giftitude that they can understand why you might think they would want it⁵.
Boardgames with high giftitude are in large printed boxes and have lots of pieces. Most of the tabletop games I play myself come in small tuck boxes with a deck of custom cards and a black and white booklet explaining the rules, but when I’m buying for other people I want them to have cards and counters, and game pieces, special dice and a board. The rules are in a full colour glossy A4 booklet. They might even come with an optional expansion set included in the box. One of the games I bought this year was a game for coffee lovers which comes with actual ceramic cups and saucers as game pieces, a fact shown off by the plastic windowed section in the front of the box. That’s giftitude, baby.
Every product category in the world has a way to identify its giftitude. Books have hard covers dust jackets, first editions and author’s signatures. Movies have box sets, special editions and HD Remasters. Music has double albums, limited edition vinyl pressings and remix variants.
So what about magic?
Giftitude in Magic
If you had a friend who was interested in magic and you didn’t know the first thing about it, you might be tempted to google “Magic Shop” look for the latest releases and pick a flashy looking expensive one. 90% of the time, this is a huge mistake. Partly because the short product cycle for magic means the latest releases are the most likely to have already been bought if they’re any good, and are also the most likely to be extremely disappointing.
The second instinct could be to look for older tricks with expensive looking heavy wooden props, but again, these can be a real gamble. Occasionally you might chance upon a hidden gem but there’s also a chance that you’ll end up with something that is just a collectors edition of the kind of magic trick they put in children’s magic sets.
Attempting to select a magic trick based on the quality of the effect is pointless, you must instead seek giftitude.
One form of giftitude in magic is large heavy hardback books, like Morgan & West’s Parlour Tricks or Ben Hart’s The Darkest Corners, these books are large and heavy with fancy covers, looking at the description they have a lot of sections with essays on theory, which very few people read but which give the books an air of sophistication. Most important however is the absolute minimum of 200 pages and shouldn’t cost less than £40. Even if someone already owns one of these, they will appreciate the gift (and the resale value).
Another avenue for giftitude is high quality versions of standard magician’s props. Even magicians who never perform the cups and balls will own a set. Anything from Rings n Things which is made of metal has a high giftitude, same goes for anything made of wood from Five of Hearts Magic.
Then there’s the classics, like The Encyclopaedia of Impromptu Magic. Out of print, hard back, large format and nearly 600 pages. No wonder they go for £400 second hand. Half of that is the postage (a joke, I assure you). Anything hardback which has “encyclopaedia” in the name or comes in multiple volumes will usually have at least a level of intrigue to it which affords it some giftitude.
In conclusion
With these lessons under your belt you can become the ultimate gift purchaser and your Secret Santa recipients will be the envy of the whole office.
And just in case any of you think this is a targeted blog post, intended to net me a haul of expensive magic props, I should inform you that everyone who knows me knows I mostly make my own props and have no need for more books on my heaving shelves. Indeed, around this time of year I open an amazon wishlist with the sole purpose of letting my parents know what to buy me⁶.
Happy Christmas Shopping!
¹ It’s 2021, all four of them are very happy together, get over it. The only sticking point for me is that because we buy gifts as groups but for individuals, my wife and I receive 2 gifts between us and his collective receives 4. It’s these little injustices that have withered my soul to the cynical husk it currently resembles.
² Fun fact about marzipan fruits that I never realised until we overbought one christmas and ate a box of them ourselves: They don’t taste of fruit. At all. They just taste of marzipan. They’re shaped and dyed to look like apples, oranges, pears, lemons and so forth but every single one just tastes like the same identical blob of marzipan. Disappointing. Conversely crystallised ginger tastes very much like ginger. It’s very strong.
³ The answer is of course the box, though to be fair these are both fairly low giftitude. Higher giftitude would require foiled detailing on the box and better yet a box which opens into two halves like an iPhone box. Apple understand giftitude better than anyone.
⁴ Except my wife. What can I say, I guess opposites attract.
⁵ Admittedly, this level of involuntary zen like acceptance requires the recipient to have a certain level of emotional maturity. Giftitude does not impress children, or even most teenagers, who are selfish creatures who know what they want and will tell you at every opportunity until they get it.
⁶ Which I guess makes me a child, even as I approach 40. Where does the time go?