Alaskan Range: Holiday Gifts
"The commercial side of the holidays offends some people, but it’s a long-standing part of the seasonal celebration. The ancient Romans were early proponents, exchanging small gifts during their Kalends new year festival,'' writes columnist and librarian Greg Hill.
When door prizes were handed out at the borough employees’ holiday party a few weeks ago, I walked away with the coveted clock that’s a breadbox-sized replica Corvette engine, which comes with a key for cranking it up, making the flywheel and belts spin and the motor rumble.
While this gift didn’t thrill my helpmeet, it did draw comparisons to the awful fringed leg lamp prize brought home by the protagonist’s old man in “A Christmas Story.” That movie has become a holiday classic since opening before Thanksgiving in 1983, despite a lackluster response from the public. In fact, by Christmas 1983 most movie-houses had dropped it.
“A Christmas Story” caught on with critics and viewers afterward, and AOL declared it the top Christmas movie of all time in 2007. Now watching it is a holiday tradition for many families.
We love holiday traditions at the library. You’ll find Christmas trees decorated by local nonprofit groups throughout Noel Wien Library, collections of holiday-related books in the children’s room, not to mention the famous staff cookie exchange.
The library has a special present for its patrons this year: the limit on DVDs borrowed at one time has been raised from seven to 10. The Fairbanks Library Foundation has unusual gift ideas, like tribute book tiles and Gold Cards, and buying them is a gift to our library, too.
The commercial side of the holidays offends some people, but it’s a long-standing part of the seasonal celebration. The ancient Romans were early proponents, exchanging small gifts during their Kalends new year festival. Instead of 60-inch flatscreens, though, they initially gave “small twigs from the groves of the goddess Strenia,” the Sabine goddess of strength and endurance, according to the library’s copy of Tanya Gulevich’s “The Encyclopedia of Christmas.”
Gulevich adds that Elizabeth I “relished her New Year’s gifts. Court records indicate the queen received silk and satin garments (once, a sea-green silk petticoat), jewelry and personal items made from precious metal (for example, a jeweled toothpick), perfume, cakes, pies, and preserved fruits.”
Gerry Bowler’s “The World Encyclopedia of Christmas” also at the library, says advertisements for Christmas gifts, mostly for children and servants, began appearing in the 18th century, “but as the century progressed adult gift-exchanges were a growing part of Christmas giving.”
This accelerated in the 19th century, when people “began to wrestle with the problem of whom to give presents and the cost of these gifts. For a while gimcracks were the answer.”
A “gimcrack,” the dictionary says, is “a cheap and showy object of little or no use; a geegaw.” “Geegaw” comes from the Middle English “giuegaue, a decorative trinket.” Gimcracks were supplanted by elaborate greeting cards for a while, “as a way to acknowledge a relationship that was not so intimate as to demand a gift.”
Bowler’s Christmas encyclopedia mentions the Society to Curtail Ridiculous, Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges, or SCROOGE. This American organization formed in 1979 to “provide good-natured moral support for those who want to modify their holiday gift-giving practices.”
Their four principles are: avoid expensive gifts, especially fads, use cash instead of credit, emphasize thoughtful and original gifts, such as handicrafts, and remember “a Merry Christmas is not for sale in any story for any amount of money.”
Holiday feasts are equally as traditional as gifts, usually featuring turkey, goose or other poultry. Smoked peppered turkey from Texas is our family holiday tradition. Not for us the Slovakians’ “oplatky” (thin waffles with honey or garlic), the Norwegians’ “svineribbe” (seasoned pork belly), nor the Czechs’ “smazena kapr” (carp and potato salad).
Another family tradition is having books under the Hill Christmas tree for everyone. Few gifts are as lasting, personal and well-made as books. Unlike e-books, print books will last centuries, regardless of future changes in computer formats and devices, reminding the recipient of your abiding affection for generations.
As Richard Llewellyn, author of “How Green Was My Valley,” put it, “O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.”
