The modern western version of “gifts” is really about pushing over-consumption. If marketers cannot convince you to buy something yourself, they can try to convince someone else to buy it for you.
I’ve always felt that gifts should be tokens. Symbols of good will, reminders of the relationship. Consumable gifts are great, especially when shared with the giver. Alcohol is great for this, but there’s plenty more you can do. Small, inexpensive art prints or figurines.
I don’t want someone else to buy me something I woukd want to research myself. My parents gave me a “snow thrower” for Christmas a couple years ago. Its a relatively cheap, Ryobi 40v thing- I do not own anything else that uses that battery ecosystem. My step-dad loves his, and I am it is great for their 2-car driveway, but my driveway can probably fit like 10 cars in it, and I would have rather saved up for something nicer myself. Now i’m in this weird limbo where I feel socially obligated to use it for several years at least before I replace it with something I actually want.
I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until my parents got divorced in 2nd grade.
I remember being very young, probably around 6, and realizing what fiction was. A lot of things which did not make sense to me I just waived off as me being young and was told I would understand when I was older suddenly were revealed as just… Lies. I think Santa Claus waa the start, but within a couple of days I realized that the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy were lies too. The “government” is not some all-knowing benevolent entity that makes sure everyone is nice to each other. The claims companies make in TV commercials are lies. And there is no God.
The world suddenly got a lot scarier, but still felt more… Right. More real.
Aa I grew older and got more exposure to other religions, I realized that religion emerges from 2 aspects of human nature. First, we want to understand the world around us. We want to know where the ground beneath us came from, where we came from, why we exist, etc. Second, there are always people looking for opportunities, who are willing to lie (or otherwise hurt others) to get power and resources for themselves.
There are some good lessons to be learned from religion. Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders for example. This could be my own personal bias, but when I read the Tao Te Ching it seems to me like Lao Tzu was an autistic person who used “The Tao” as a way to solve the double-empathy problem.
But also a lot of religion is just old fiction. From the days before the internet and copyright laws. Imagine a Star Wars or Harry Potter fanfiction website, then imagine that those people can only communicate physically and in a world where most of them cannot read or write, and these communities persist for hundreds or thousands of years.
I really like going down the rabbit holes at the intersection of archeology and theology. There are plenty of books that did not make it into the Bible, and even the books that did make it in have different versions and translations across history and sects. A lot of what we think of as modern Christianity comes from Dante’s Inferno rather than the Bible.
So all this means that the messages tend to be inconsistent. Even when the actual text remains the same, the way those texts are interpreted and used in practice can vary significantly. So it’s really more about you interpreting and applying things for yourself than the actual texts, and this is something you can do just as well with any other piece of art.