I have never been good at choosing gifts for people, and it's especially noticeable when they're people that I'm close with. This was never really an issue when I was a child, because no one expects children to give exceptional presents, but as soon as I hit my teens there was some sort of understanding that I had to up my game.
In middle school I had only a few friends to get gifts for, but come high school there were many more that I needed to consider. it came to the point that, if you got a gift for one of them, you certainly couldn't snub the next, and then it would snowball so that you were getting presents for every single person you had ever come into contact with, and, since I had no job during these years, I was left with the task of buying more gifts than I could carry with as little money as possible.
This particular Christmas, I was interested in Diana, and hoped that I could manage to woo her before the holidays so that I would have someone to kiss on New Years. Well, there were other reasons, too, but that was one of them.
In the weeks leading up to the last day of classes before Christmas, I ended up spending my afternoons wandering around the malls downtown with my friends in an effort to find gifts for my other friends.
On one of the first trips downtown, I was with Natalie, babbling on about how I wanted to get something special for Diana and how I had no idea what to get anyone, which I think was my hint that she should tell me what I should get her. We were close enough at that point that I really should have known what the perfect gift idea for her would have been, but, you know how it goes.
With no job, and working with whatever birthday money was leftover in my bank account, I had to buy four gifts for family members, and eight presents for friends, none of which I could really afford. In retrospect, I wish that someone had convinced me that buying something for Diana was a bad idea.
Instead, Natalie convinced me that it was a great idea and it would show that I really cared for her. This moment would lead to a bad decision in the next few weeks, and, looking back on it, I still wonder what I could have been thinking to so much as consider it. But that comes a little later in the story, as, at this point, Natalie and I were going around town together trying to find the most brilliant thing to give to Diana to prove that she and I were meant to be together.
And we found it. It was an elaborate piece of memorabilia from a beloved childhood memory of Diana's that she had mentioned, off-hand, months before. It was hard to find, slightly more than I could afford, and something that she absolutely loved as soon as she opened it. And I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
As the days wore on, and I gathered gifts for the people closest to me, I started to run out of ideas for what people would like. Of course, when you ask someone else their opinion, they always tell you that they're not sure, mostly because they have a few ideas already, but need them for themselves. Those for whom I had no gift ideas were left last on the list, and by the time I actually got to them, there was a severe lack of paper in my pockets. And here's the moment that really painted me as a bad friend, and I wish I could go back and redo it.
I decided that, since I still had no ideas of what to get Natalie, and I also had no money with which to buy her anything, that I would get her something small and write her a card saying that I would be getting her something else by the new year. My idea was that, since she had encouraged me to get something for Diana, that she would understand that I had run out of time and currency.
The message that that actually sent was that I thought very little of her and put the happiness of someone that wasn't interested in me ahead of her own.
So the last day before Christmas arrives, and everyone's exchanging gifts, everyone's really excited, and wrapping paper is flying all over the art room (we exchanged gifts in the art room, because that's where our entire school-life was lived). I wasn't actually there when Natalie opened her gift from me, but at the time I had assumed that her reaction would be "oh, well, that's cool, at least I have something to look forward to getting in the new year," but I'm pretty sure her reaction was "...really? SERIOUSLY?" because she wasn't speaking to me the next time I saw her.
Diana's reaction was also the opposite of what I had been expecting. Instead of being really excited that I had found whatever treasured childhood memory she had been blathering on about, she just sort of looked at it, said "oh wow!" and then continued on opening other presents. About a year later I would be over at Diana's apartment and she would say something to the effect of "can you believe I still have this thing?" to which I would respond "I'd be disappointed if you didn't," to which she would then say "...really? But I don't keep anything!"
So, in one day, I managed to completely underwhelm myself with how impressive my gift-giving abilities were to the girl I wished to woo, and I also managed to almost destroy a friendship by my complete lack of understanding towards how important gift-giving could be.
Fortunately, I had some extremely persuasive friends that were able to convince Natalie that what I did wasn't terrible, which it absolutely was, and she forgave me. At least, she said she did, she's probably still angry.
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