Why I want someone to buy me socks for Christmas

Oh Christmas. Christmas. Why do you torment me thus? Every year the John Lewis ad, the first sign of overhead lighting on Regent Street, the first sound of Noddy Holder’s voice in a retail environment, gives me a twinge of agony. Like mental toothache.

This is not Scroogery. I don’t dislike Christmas. Carols, chestnuts, turkey, afternoon snooze, mince pies, being sick on eggnog, crackers, the Queen’s speech: all in my top ten favourite things, give or take. And I don’t begrudge the expenditure, either: I love giving people presents. I’d like to sweep through Selfridges, Hamleys, Waterstones and Gosh! Comics fountaining money behind me like some sort of money lawnmower whose grass-collecting attachment has fallen off.

It’s the choosing! Consumer society has given us an effectively infinite number of things we can buy as presents; you’d think I’d have option paralysis, rather than the opposite. But I have the opposite. I cannot think of a single thing to buy for the people who matter most to me: things that, you know, they might actually want and not already have.

Children are pretty easy. Children don’t have money to buy stuff, so they get excited about getting stuff, full stop. Lego fire engine, glow-in-the-dark lightsaber… they’re happy with any old tat. Parents, siblings, old friends and wives, on the other hand—wives especially—are fricking impossible. Clothes, an old standby, are high risk: most adults who have opinions about clothes don’t want to get clothes from an adult who doesn’t. Cookery equipment? They all now own a Le Creuset pot. Scent? Done it. Books or CDs? Nobody plays CDs any more, do they? And I can’t give books because—my day job being a literary journalist—everyone will assume that I’m simply “regifting” free copies from publishers. Scarves? An old friend of mine actually cried on Christmas Day when she received 14 scarves. And let’s not even start on slipper-socks and hot water bottles.

Just as Godwin’s Law states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” Leith’s Law states that “As a family relationship grows longer, the probability of a Christmas present involving a soap-on-a-rope in the shape of a giant golf ball approaches one.”

And all these useless things—the sorts of things you only buy as gifts and never for oneself—clutter their houses up. I know this; they know this. In a sane world, you’d throw that special egg-poaching device straight in the bin. But, because it was a present, you feel morally obliged to keep it in the kitchen cupboard. Who knows? One day you might get bored of poaching eggs with a pan of water and a slotted spoon.

Grandparents, on the other end of this whole equation, must by now be stoically acclimatised to the whole thing. My memory of childhood Christmases—and given how little you are aware as a child of anything anyone else gets for Christmas, it says something that this went in—is that literally every year my grandmothers received bath salts, or bath pearls, or (when these became a thing) bath bombs. Even then, I was aware this seemed a bit rough on them: as if we’d imagined that the main characteristic of grandmothers is that they spend most of their lives in the bath, and that’s why they’re wrinkly. And yet they had found peace in acceptance: they always seemed extremely happy with these gifts.

Some sort of Christmas present de-escalation seems the way forward. And here’s what I propose. What if we all, as adults, agreed to buy each other the same thing? And what if, instead of wriggling pathetically in the doomed attempt to avoid buying slightly disappointing presents, we got out ahead of the problem and bought slightly disappointing presents deliberately. What if we—as some like to say—took ownership of the problem. Buy those bath pearls. Be at home with scarves. Go bold with soap on a rope. Buy each other—without fear—a five-pack of Marks & Spencer socks. What greater gift can you give your loved ones, after all, than the gift of not going Christmas shopping?

It is no sort of coincidence, incidentally—though it may be a sign of advancing age—that, this year as most years, what I actually want is socks.