'Tis the season

...to give. I know that some of you enjoy giving and receiving neighbor gifts at Christmas time. In fact, right now you’re putting the finishing touches on your homemade, hand-dipped chocolates or your caramel macadamia nut popcorn balls before wrapping them in cellophane and red French ribbon and delivering them to snow-covered homes all over the block. If you’re one of those people, you may want to skip this post. But if you’re like me, and the thought of having to come up with a cutesy neighborhood gift every year makes you want to run, then by all means, read on.


When I moved into our neighborhood thirteen years ago, I excitedly joined in with the gift exchange tradition. Every year I tried to come up with something delicious and clever and Martha Stewartish to give to our neighbors, like the one year I gave everyone a membership to the "Cookie of the Month Club". For an entire year I made a different kind of cookie each month and delivered them in little decorative tins to all of the neighbors. I couldn't think of anything else to do, because usually someone had already cornered the market on the muslin bags filled with pistachios, the chips and salsa, the caramel popcorn. We got plates of cookies, bags of clementines, homemade toffee and fudge, a poinsettia, a basket of apples and pears, miniature loaves of bread, soup mixes, muffin mixes, pancake mixes.

And I noticed something else: the neighbor gifts we received were piling up in the pantry, often going uneaten until I was forced to throw them out after New Year’s. So one year my neighbor wrote a letter to the members of our neighborhood, inviting them to forgo giving each other gifts and attend a bonfire and hot chocolate party instead, where we’d collect money and donate it to a charity. That worked well for a couple of years, until the bonfire tradition fizzled out after our ward boundaries changed. But everyone on our street liked not having to give each other gifts so much that we’ve had an unspoken agreement not to exchange gifts ever since.

Except now, some new people have moved into the neighborhood and no one has clued them in to our agreement, so little by little, the gift-giving custom is taking over the neighborhood again. Sometimes—and I’m not proud of this, mind you—I even resort to regifting, and the loaf of cranberry orange bread that Mrs. Farmer dropped off gets a new tag and goes right back out the door to the Browns next door.

But one neighbor (she isn't even a neighbor anymore, since she moved to Heber last summer) in particular—I’ll call her Sharon—a lovely woman, enjoys giving generous, elaborate, thoughtful gifts, and each year I look forward to seeing her creativeness. So today, she delivered a beautifully wrapped, chocolate orange, and a christmas movie on DVD about Christmas Oranges. I had nothing wrapped and ready to give her except for some other neighbors gift, but I really didn't feel okay about regifting, at least not to her.

That made me feel better, somehow, so I put the DVD in the player and then ate the chocolate orange. And then I resolved to give Sharon something really spectacular next year. Next year for sure.

Do you ever regift neighbor gifts?