At a holiday party last week, I fell into idle chitchat with a fellow GenX-age partygoer and we spun through the usual conversation topics for two people who don’t know each other and won’t remember each other at next year’s party and who both know it and are fine with it and eventually got to the “are you ready for Christmas” line. And it was during this conversation that I had an epiphany.

I’ve never been what I’d consider to be a good gift giver but I’m old enough to remember the days of shopping when if you wanted something, you had to go out and scour stores for it. This was bad for people like me, because it took time, money and planning. In my twenties and thirties I was a very poor planner with a lot of credit card debt and later, as a working mom, I boiled with resentment and guilt that I simply didn’t have TIME to spend hours shopping around the holidays. I wanted to tell everyone that I’d make a deal with them – if they wouldn’t get me anything, I wouldn’t get them anything either and our gift to each other would be a slightly less stressful holiday experience. And as solitary as I felt about that, of course I wasn’t alone. I vividly remember being at home with my baby one Christmas Eve and seeing a news helicopter circling the exit for our nearby mall, which was backed up for at least a mile down the highway with an hour or so to go before closing time. And I remember the story (perhaps apocryphal) of a hapless suitor who waited until the absolute last second of Christmas Eve and had to gift his no doubt nonplussed sweetheart a selection of Walgreens gifts including one of those fabric roses in the plastic tube.

If I wanted something specific for somebody, and waited for the last couple of weeks before a holiday or birthday, which I always did because it rarely if ever occurred to me to buy gifts throughout the year and stockpile them, the odds were that I’d never find it. Cue aimless wandering around some packed and hysterical shopping mall with increasing panic until I ended up convincing myself that some lame yet expensive tchotchke was exactly okay and then buying two because I felt guilty that I knew the gift was crap.

Gift receiving can also be fraught. In my youthful experience it was rarely possible to exchange gifts that had equal weight of meaning although perhaps surprisingly, I wasn’t always been on the weak side of that equation. During my senior year in college, I was seeing a young man that I was pretty smitten with and went to (at the time, I felt) lengths to special order him a hard to find jazz CD that we’d heard playing when we browsed our campus bookstore together. I was thrilled to give this to him and one afternoon I indicated in a telephone conversation that we should exchange gifts that evening, before we each left campus for Christmas. He paused momentarily and then agreed. He came over to our apartment with a paper sack and I could see when he opened his CD (wrapped and with a card that I’d agonized over writing) that while he was happy with the gift, he was also not at all happy because it was as evident to him then as a tornado ripping through the apartment that my feelings for him were different than his for me. My paper sack held one of the “Magic Eye” books that were popular in the mid-90’s, where you look at a field of static and eventually a horse or something reveals itself. My roommate happened to walk in as I was removing the book from its distinctly non-festive sack and she (possessed of no social filter) yelped with laughter and said, “Oh my God, what is that? Sara, you HATE those!” (and to the young man) “She constantly says she can’t ever see the thing and they’re like, totally annoying!” Despite my shooting her an iron stare while she continued to peal with merry laughter on her way through the apartment, and trying to give him reassurance that his gift was in fact perfect because now I could PRACTICE my Magic Eye skills, the damage was done. Whether because of that or for other likely connected reasons, he broke up with me when we returned to campus after the New Year.

Online shopping has helped me enormously although I hadn’t stopped to think about it until that epiphany of a party conversation. The epiphany being that although I still feel like a bad gift giver, it’s been many years since I operated with the active dread of gifting and that’s entirely because of the convenience of online shopping. Now, if I want something specific for someone, I have literally the world at my fingertips and I can usually come up with something more suitable than a Yankee candle or a pair of Christmas earrings that would turn your earlobes green or a day planner from the Hallmark store which then you could never buy refills for. So thank you Al Gore for the miracle of the Internet so that I can find that old out-of-print book in a used book shop in Spokane or the exact charm for my daughter’s bracelet from a seller in the UK or the perfect piece of handmade whatever from Etsy. (And fuck tariffs.)

I do still think that life would be easier at this time of year and maybe even better in a lot of ways if we all just cooled it a bit and decided that gifts aren’t make or break. (I’m not talking about for kids, although that has gotten a lot easier too now that kiddo is seventeen.) Set a dollar value! Exchange a book that you each liked during the year. Treat each other to a coffee or a nice drink instead. Decide you’re going to make a donation to the other person’s nonprofit of choice. I promise you there is someone in your life who would appreciate this enormously (besides me).