19 | Giving Gifts

As a kid, I’m sure I gave some terrible gifts. Not intentionally, of course. I just didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know the process. And there is a process. Giving presents is ultimately a puzzle that we are trying to piece together, a problem to be solved. Like any problem, it just needs the right blend of observation and creativity to find its answer.

But young Damian didn’t know that. Young Damian didn’t have a fricken clue. Young Damian also didn’t have a lot of money. What he did have was ten dollars and five people to buy presents for.

It’s Christmas when I was maybe ten or so, so we’re going back to the mid to late nineties. As a ten year old, I didn’t have an income or my own mode of transportation but thankfully I had a Mum who provided both of these in her usual organised way. I am one of four kids, and am the youngest, by seven minutes. My sister is four years older than me, my elder brother two, and my twin brother, well, let’s remember back to the aforementioned seven minutes.

Mum has driven us to a shopping centre. In my mind we are in Morwell, the next urbanised country town over from our own, at a shopping centre called Midvalley, also colloquially known as Mad Valley, which is likely more a statement about the people that frequent there than the establishment itself. In this memory, we are not just in Mad Valley but in a store with a bright red and yellow frontage. This store is called The Reject Shop.

For those unfamiliar, it is your basic discount store, full of items of all varieties, some branded, some off-brand, all filling the shelves in a systemised way. We enter, the five of us, four kids and a Mum. She hands us each ten dollars and then we are sent to hunt. We break, each initially taking a different section before we begin to roam the aisles of the store, each careful not to cross paths too often lest one of the other hunters sees what it is you have claimed for them.

Two dollars per present and a child’s mind. You can all but guarantee these weren’t good gifts. Or where they? It’s hard to say, to be honest. While I have no doubt some were rushed and lazy and limited by the price, I also have to assume there were some gems in there, some moments where the right item and the right train of thought meant that even with all the limitations at hand I was still able to give a family member something they, if not treasured, liked well enough and put to some use. I hope so. But I also suspect I mostly bought my siblings bags of lollies, which exists in a middle ground of gift giving, not unappreciated but lacking any real thought and with an inbuilt temporariness to the present; the gift card of the kid world.

It was my parents who most likely really copped the slop. As a kid, I couldn’t fathom what it was that constituted a good gift for my parents, which is a real shame given that on Christmas day they were the masters of giving gifts, providing not only a mountain of presents that blew my tiny mind with not just the thoughtfulness but also their abundance and variety. The presentation of the gifts, spread out over a couch, filling it up in a way that defied belief, was a present unto itself. It caused a rush of emotions so extreme that it’s a shock I didn’t explode then and there in our lounge room, just go off like a party popper due to every electron in my body vibrating with excitement. So, given this, it’s a shame that in return I probably gave them a mug with some lame joke I didn’t understand on the side.

Later in life, once the creativity bug had bit, I would occasionally give homemade gifts, which I have to hope contained a little more thought and value. The first of these I can remember is giving my parents each a recreation of a comic character which I had lovingly placed in matching frames. I say recreation because, and I can’t stress this enough, these images were not traced. Dad’s Snoopy and Mum’s Garfield were painstakingly drawn by hand with many erasings and corrections as I strived to get the curve of Snoopy’s nose or the lines in Garfield’s coat just right. They sat on their respective bedside tables for years and may well sit there still.

As an adult, my required gift giving has dropped. I don’t necessarily have as many people around me I need to give presents to. I don’t have kids and so have yet to fully experience that side of the equation. My immediate family will still get one, but usually only if they’ve planned a gathering of some kind. I will however order something from overseas for the family that lives there since their gatherings are a little too far for a weekend. There’s Holly, of course. And then, there are the Scaredy Boys.

Buying gifts for friends has never been a big part of my life. As a kid, this act was likely left to Mum, and as a teen I never had the money. It also seems to me that whether you give gifts between friends or not is entirely dependent on the individual friend group. For my group of high school friends, it has never been a thing. Big birthdays, sure, and the occasional bottle of something if you happened to see them on the day, but that was far from a guarantee as I suppose mostly we all saw birthdays as a family occasion. Otherwise, our celebrations with each other were just being together when we were together and not birthday specific.

For Holly and her friends, it is very much a thing. Birthdays for them were for friends as much as family, and so with that came presents. The higher percentage of this particular friendship group were all born in the first few months of the year, and so Holly’s bank balance, especially as a poor uni student or entry level worker, always took a hit at this time. Even now, when partners and family and work means they don’t always catch up for birthdays, they’ll still usually send something by post. Flowers, something sweet, alcohol of some kind; a physical representation to say I’m thinking of you.

The funny thing about gift giving within a friend group however, is that it only takes one to get the whole thing rolling. For my Scaredy Boy friends, Sean and Tom, who I do a podcast with, unsurprisingly called Scaredy Boys, it was Sean who got things rolling. He is a prodigious gift giver, guaranteed to give you something on your birthday but also just as likely to surprise you with a thoughtful something or other just because. In fact, he did such a good job of supplying Tom and I with thoughtful birthday presents in the early days of our friendship that I think both of us immediately realised a bar had been set and we had best do our best to reach it. And now we do. They are the only friends I really buy presents for and thankfully for me it is a task I find very easy. We have many shared interests and hobbies and so all I really need to do is go shopping for myself and then be willing to hand the item over on the day, resisting the urge to keep it.

Even still, as some of the few people I buy presents for I find myself planning their gifts. Having a small radar out for something particular to them and their sensibilities so that when it appears it sets off a ping and I make a note of it.

That radar is an important element of gift giving. I think it’s the key to the whole thing. It’s an unconscious searching, an awareness of a thing even if you don’t fully know the shape and function of it. It allows for a more thoughtful and stress free gift giving experience as when done right, presents for your loved ones will have been bought weeks to months in advance and not some desperate scramble at the end where you can convince yourself of any ol’ piece of tat just to have the whole thing done; the adult equivalent of going to The Reject Shop with ten dollars in your hand.

I like to think my radar is pretty good. For the people I know I will give to, it has a time dependent scan, usually increasing in its strength in the months closer to their birthday and Christmas, but generally it’s also on all year round.

I have a box in my bedroom where I store these pre-purchased gifts. It lives on the upper shelf of my wardrobe, the one that’s high and hard to reach. This box is not pretty. It is in fact a standard cardboard box, one branded in blue lettering to show what it originally contained before it became a makeshift present box; marlboro cigarettes. I don’t know where it came from as I am not a smoker and definitely not enough to order them in bulk, but clearly this one was close at hand. It has been serving me well now for decades.

Buying presents can be stressful, which is such a strange and unique kind of stress, one that, I believe, comes from a mixture of both laziness and love. This is because it is most stressful when we have left it to the last minute and can feel the pressure of time on our backs while still also wanting to find something worthy of the person we love. Or worse, loving someone deeply whilst still also having no idea what to buy them! How is it that we can hold someone dear enough in our hearts that we want to celebrate them and their continued existence but still have it that they’re interests and tastes are a mystery to us?

The reality is that gift giving takes time and thought. Do enough of both and you’ll solve the puzzle, you’ll find the unknown thing you’re looking for.

This year, I have a lot of time on my hands and basically spend all that time thinking. Now granted, most of that is meant to be poured into my creative projects, but I also wanted to set some of it aside so that I could plan something nice for Holly’s birthday.

Not the actual gifts, mind. My radar had already been doing its work for the last little while and my cigarette box was filled with an assortment of presents to give her. I’m talking here of some activities for the day itself. An additional present that doesn’t come in the form of a physical object but instead takes the shape of time spent together doing something unique that will elicit excitement and enjoyment from the one you are celebrating. However, Holly and I have been together now for an astounding fifteen years and so finding something unique to do together can be a challenge. It was a challenge I was ready to take on.

As with most creative challenges, the first thing I had to do was get the bad or obvious ideas out of the way first. I considered and discarded our usual funtivities, as it needed to feel greater than the standard kind of thing we’d do on a given weekend. I likewise ditched any ideas that were too great. Money is tight, as was time, as she had other birthday catchups across the weekend, and so there would be no weekend away, no whisking her off to someplace new. It had to happen in our usual neck of the woods, across a single day, something fresh but familiar. I considered what her interests were. Books and food are always a comfort. We both enjoy a craft beer or playing games together. And, she loves travel, which is ultimately the act of exploring a space. So. If the day could include all of those, I’d be doing just fine.

Let’s start with the food. Brunch is an easy option thanks to Melbourne’s rich cafe culture. Beer, likewise so. Choose the right suburb and you’ll have no end to a selection of wonderful pubs. What about books? We could just sit and read somewhere nice but that didn’t feel festive enough. I could take her to a bookshop and let her choose a book for me to buy her, but again it didn’t have the pop I was looking for.

A couple of years ago we were in Bendigo for a weekend. At one point we found ourselves needing to kill some time and not being overly familiar with the city, we almost wished we could do a walking tour of it like we would when visiting any major European city. Instead, we came up with our own way to tour the city. Visit all of its op shops, or charity shops, with the direct purpose to scrounge through their book selections and hopefully find some winners. It worked wonders. By the time we were done, we had a handle on Bendigo’s CBD and an armful of books to one day read, and had fun doing it.

That was the pop I was looking for. It included exploring and hunting and books, and who knew what other treasures we might find.

The idea was coming into focus. We would go for brunch somewhere, then visit a number of op shops, ideally all within walking distance of each other, and then…

Beer.

During my time running the adult programs at Story Studios Australia, I ran a dozen or so Writer’s Pub Crawls, which are pretty much exactly what they sound like; a pub crawl with writing. They were always brilliant. I would lead a handful of writers to three different pubs, with an hour spent writing at each one, and I would provide a number of prompts or writing challenges across the day. Inevitably by the final pub, there was not a lot of writing going on, instead it was all chat between an initial group of strangers who through the combination of shared interests and alcohol were fast becoming friends.

So, why don’t we follow the op shop crawl with a pub crawl. Again, it would be great if these were all within walking distance of each other, so we could spend the whole day exploring on foot.

I liked this. But I had one more idea, again stolen from when I ran the writers pub crawl. Occasionally, at the start of those I would give all the writers a bingo card, a list of things to hunt down and find throughout the day. Things like: A very unlikely assassin, or, an insect with a big personality, or, ham. Things that felt specific but in reality were actually broad, as long as a writer added a splash of imagination and justified how it was they had seen that thing. If they did that, well then the baby drooling over its chew toy just became an unlikely assassin.

I created a similar list for Holly and I to find, and with all the wonders and oddities that op shops have to offer, I had no doubt we would complete the list.

I next made what was initially a powerpoint that I could give her to inform her of our day of activities. I’m an amateur graphic designer, and so I began mocking it up on canva. As I was doing so I saw a little button off to the side that read ‘Get it Printed With Canva’. That was interesting. I clicked the link and found I could get it printed as a rather smart looking booklet. Unique, definitely, and it would provide an artefact of the day, which I liked. I redesigned all the pages from landscape to portrait, and we were away.

The booklet contained a cover page; a page telling her where we’d be getting brunch, with a photo, address, and time; a page listing the op shops we would be visiting and another with the list of things to find on our scavenger hunt; a page with the details of our pub crawl, and then needed one more page to give an even amount. I decided to make it a page to jot down any thoughts from the day. I clicked print and was told I did not have enough pages. The website needed a minimum of eight pages to print a booklet and I presently had six. That was a pickle.

I pondered how to fill it out and in so doing found the missing piece to this whole equation I didn’t even realise I had been missing.

A few months prior, I had seen a kids camera on the internet. Well, it was marketed for kids, but upon seeing it, I wanted one. A small and colourful case, a bear's face on the front, and it printed the photos in black and white using heat printing. Think a low cost polaroid that doesn’t actually use any ink. It was awesome! I had no reason to buy it, and so with reluctance I resisted its siren song.

But, now, what if I bought Holly and I each one of the colourful cameras and our scavenger hunt became a photo scavenger hunt? Missing piece found.

I immediately jumped online and ordered two of the cameras, one green one purple. I then changed the notes page to a photos page, and added two more. Rules. I needed rules. For the photo scavenger hunt, when you found the thing in question you had to get a photo of yourself with the thing in question. If that drooling baby was your unlikely assassin, well then you can’t tick that one off until you pop a selfie with it.

Print. That. Booklet.

I was excited. The excitement you feel when you know you have a gift the receiver is going to enjoy. When the process has worked, when the puzzle has been solved, when you have found the thing you’re looking for.

I practically waited by the mailbox for the cameras and booklet. They arrived with a few days to spare. The booklet looked great and I had a play with the cameras to charge them and ensure they worked and was shocked by how good they were.

My beautiful idiot didn’t know what she had waiting for her.

The response was as I hoped. Delight and excitement and equally as taken by the kids cameras as I was. It is funny just how enamoured we both were by them, and truthfully still are. While obviously we have thinner sleeker devices in our pockets at all times that can do what these kids cameras do and much better, both in resolution and by the fact our phones photos are in colour, there was something about the practicality of these cameras, the physicalness of them and the photos that felt both wonderfully nostalgic and futuristic. In many ways I don’t think it was us that were enamoured by these products but our inner children. We both commented on how if we’d received these as kids it would have blown our tiny minds and we likely would have taken terrible photos all day long. Being able to once again feel that thrill at having an object that is yours and that you can ultimately create something with drove the nostalgia, the futurism came from the fact of just how easily I was able to purchase them, the sad cheapness and disposability of these products, and that they are just one of an endless amount of things you can catch in the sea of internet shopping.

They also came with a lanyard you can attach to the sides of the camera and so I pressured Holly into wearing it as a colourful and chunky necklace. She made it look good.

Booklet given, camera received, we packed a bag and were off to explore a suburb not too far from our own; Thornbury. I have passed through Thornbury many times since moving to Melbourne but I’d never really stopped and seen what it had to offer. I have done with the adjoining suburbs, but realised it Thornbury has sadly always been missed. Thankfully, in researching for this gift, I discovered it was home to a bevy of bars and pubs, numerous op shops, and a number of choice cafes to choose from. In other words, it was perfect for our day's outing.

A bus and a short walk saw us to Little Tienda, a Mexican and Southern Californian inspired cafe where we wanted to eat everything on the menu. It’s one of those cafes you see often in inner city Melbourne that doesn’t hide the fact that it was once just a regular house. The main seating was in a covered courtyard beside the building and it felt like we were just sitting in someones, admittedly tastefully decorated, backyard. I am always charmed by these kinds of places, I love that they wear their history on their sleeves, and what better way to show a customer hospitality than to give the illusion that you have just welcomed them into your home.

The food was exactly as good as we were hoping it would be, a blend of Mexico with Melbourne’s cafe culture, and the coffee rich and dark and strong. We were already on the hunt for photos. While waiting for our food, we looked around hoping to find something that could fit one of the options on our checklist. Admittedly, we were unsuccessful here, perhaps the coffee hadn’t kicked in enough for us to creatively describe something as ‘a terrible motivational quote’ or ‘something that has a face but shouldn’t’, but that was alright. It was still early days and no doubt the op shops would be filled with likely options.

We finished up, hopped another bus and headed toward High Street.

There is a vibe to High Street. It runs through the centre of Thornbury and is filled with cafes, bars, and restaurants, as well as shopping. The shopping ranges from regular stores to the more boutique, like vintage clothing shops, record stores, homewares, and local art galleries. And of course, op shops. There is a character to High Street, it feels artistic and creative, bohemian, the kind of place people like to hang out and simply stroll around, with the street being home to both heritage-listed sites and more modern developments. It’s not as loud as its more trendier neighbours like Brunswick or Fitzroy but it’s lively enough to keep things interesting.

We kicked things off at Sacred Heart Mission Op Shop where I was immediately greeted by a Crying Boy. The Crying Boy is a series of paintings I have some history with. It stems from my aforementioned podcast Scaredy Boys and the friends I host it with. When Tom and his partner managed to buy themselves an apartment, Sean had the idea that we should celebrate this fact by purchasing a painting for them. But, as we’re a horror movie review podcast done from the perspective of cowards, Sean also had the idea that this painting should ideally be cursed. Enter, the crying boy.

I won’t give you the whole history of this painting, you can google it easily enough for yourself, except to say that in the eighties it was briefly believed that prints of a series of paintings all of children crying, done by the artist Giovanni Bragolin, were responsible for a number of house fires all across England. Or in other words, cursed.

So, after Tom bought his apartment, Sean found a print of one of the crying boys at a vintage store, I purchased it, and we both gave it to Tom and his partner, Amanda.

Then a year or two later, Sean moved house. You can guess what we bought him.

So imagine my surprise and delight when upon entering the first op shop of the day to find a crying boy up on the wall looking down on me with those oh so familiar tears in his eyes. This delight was doubled by the fact that one of the items on our scavenger hunt was something that is guaranteed to be cursed. Fucking, tick!

We wandered the big store, focused mostly on the books and puzzles for actual purchases, but scouring it all to find likely options for our photos. It did take some shedding of self consciousness to pull a silly pose with some item in an op shop while your partner took a photo of you with a bright and colourful kids camera, or worse you tried to take a selfie of yourself, but thankfully, if you were going to do that anywhere, Thornbury was the place to do it.

First op shop scoured, we moved on to the next one. And so went our next few hours. Exploring the trash and treasures, looking for the weird and wonderful, snapping photos as we walked and talked our way up High Street. The day was hot, surprisingly so for late March, and our thirst was climbing. It was soon to be sated.

At midday, we stopped at Carwyn Cellars. As the name suggests, it is a cellar, with isles and fridges full of liquors of every kind. However, if you pass through the shopfront and out an arched door at the back you enter a bar filled with seating, old arcade games, and posters lining the walls. Behind the bar is a wall of bottles, and in front of it is a row of taps each with some delicious craft beer waiting inside. We got a table, purchased some beers, and took two big and delicious mouthfuls. As we drank, Holly began to paste the photos we had already taken into the back of her booklet. I had provided her with some double sided tape as part of her present for just this purpose. It was nice to see we were already making memories. Nostalgia, it turns out, can happen almost immediately, and already looking at those black and white photos filled me with a kind of warm joy.

However, we had far from exhausted our list. Two that were proving harder than expected were: A terrible motivational quote and A piece of rubbish that deserves the pixar treatment. The quote we thought for sure we’d find in the op shops, that there would be some old fashioned sign with some questionable advice on it, or a piece of clothing with some lame slogan printed on the front. No such luck. As for the rubbish, either we weren’t looking hard enough or Thornbury was proving cleaner than expected.

We finished our drink and went looking for another one as we were officially in the pub crawl part of the day. As we walked, we searched, looking for anything that could fulfil the requirements of the scavenger hunt. We saw graffiti and took a photo under it as something that makes you ask, why? I saw two old men, plodding along the sidewalk talking together and snapped a photo as my two unlikely assassins.

At our second bar, The Thornbury Local, I got my terrible motivational quote. Or, at least Holly found it, but I snapped the photo. A tag on the heavily graffitied bathroom wall that read ‘Eat pussy, live long’. Holly found her own as we left, a small a-frame sign in front of a dentist with the words ‘Only floss the teeth you want to keep’ written in chalk.

We were getting close to crossing off all the items on our list, and strangely it was the rubbish that was proving a problem. As we made our way to our final bar, Welcome to Thornbury, an outdoor drinking hall that has a rotating set of food trucks inside it, we scoured the streets, searching for the one piece of rubbish that had the right joie de vivre. Rubbish that we could project a sweet and comic personality on to, to the point that pixar could centre a whole film around them

And here is where our scavenger hunt crosses over with giving gifts. The hunt for the perfect thing, the I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it object, the searching for something that without these specific parameters and motivation, we’d never otherwise search for.

And in searching, suddenly we saw. The whole day we had been seeing, truly seeing, everything this street had to offer. We found insects with big personalities and people that were definitely hiding something, dogs wearing clothes and cursed objects and everyday items that when looked at in just the right way had a face that could look right back at you. All these things that usually we would have passed by with barely a glance or a thought, but now, suddenly, they were a treasure waiting to be discovered. On any other day they would have been unremarkable or unimportant but it wasn’t any other day, it was this day, Holly’s birthday, and so for these two scavengers they were remarkable and important and the very things we were looking for.

And that was the gift. I didn’t truly know it when I planned the day but the most fun came from finding something ordinary, getting excited about it, and holding it up so we could take a silly selfie with the thing.

What a treat, that treasure can be created with just the right prompt. That with just a few simple sentences we could make fun puzzles to piece together, and interesting problems to be solved, just as long as we had the right blend of observation and creativity to find the answer.

By the time we arrived at Welcome to Thornbury we still hadn’t found our pixar-esque piece of rubbish. We ordered a final drink and some bahn-mi loaded fries and when we finished eating them, I picked up the cardboard clamshell box they had come in, drew a face on the front, and took a photo with it.

Holly laughed as I handed her the photo before sticking it into her booklet.

One final gift to see out the day.

Thank you so much for reading these Stray Thoughts and until next time keep your eyes open and your radar on for any potential gifts because they can be hiding just about anywhere.