The supposedly great thing about the DIY gift is that the giver put in the time and effort to personally make something for someone else to enjoy. If you subscribe to this theory then it follows that the real gift is the thought and the effort, not the thing itself. It therefore gets all sorts of leeway in terms of how well made the thing is or even whether or not it was something the receiver even wanted in the first place.
Even if the giver is able to make something truly good (great is virtually impossible) this type of DIY gift is still bull$hit. It is a selfish act designed to please the person making it. If life is all about the journey and not the final destination then the giver of the DIY gift is hogging all the good stuff. It would be like giving someone a homemade gift certificate to come watch you play tennis. You’d be better off giving the gift you made to yourself and then sign them up for a lotion making class or for whatever homemade bull$hit you pulled out of your DIY a$$.
The optimal setup for the DIY gift is to put zero effort into the it while giving it the appearance that you made it yourself. No selfish “journey” of making it for the giver and the receiver gets the benefit of a high quality gift that they can believe was made just for them. It’s as pure of a win-win as you can get.
YOU: But this is lying and lying is wrong (clutching your pearls while receiving communion)!
Wake up, sheople. Despite what the Hallmark movies tell you, some lies are fine. Even if you get caught it will end up being a funny story that your loved one can tell at dinner parties (yet another gift).
Now that we’ve ended that morality play, how does one do this exactly? Here are a few suggestions (hint: there is a pattern).
- Scoop some fancy-smelling lotion into a different jar – Go to your local Walgreens or CVS and find the cheapest body lotion with lavender in it. Buy a small mason jar like this one and some country-ish looking labels. Scoop the lotion into the mason jar. Label the jar with something barely humorous like “Mabel’s Motion Lotion.” Done. You can also do this with candles, though it may be difficult to get the candles out of the original container. I actually think this would be a benefit because a rough fit in the new jar could be explained by saying it was difficult to remove the the candle from the mold you used to make it.
- Buy a cable knit sweater and remove the tags – Buy a nice-looking cable knit sweater like this one. Use a seam ripper and cleanly take the tag off. Make sure to remove any of those white labels with washing instructions, too. Heighten the receiver’s appreciation by lying about sneaking off to some random room in the house where you knit this beautiful, hand-made sweater when nobody was looking.
- Buy some peppermint bark and put it into a dominos tin – Buy some dominos that come in a tin. Open the tin and dump the dominos directly into the garbage because, I’m sorry, nobody really plays dominos. Maybe wash it out but really who cares, toxins are everywhere anyway. Buy some gourmet peppermint bark and just put it in the dominos tin. Pull the same stupid labeling trick I described for the fraudulent lotion above. This one is especially great since peppermint bark is super easy to make. Overpaying for some already-made bark should make you feel particularly good about your selflessness.
- Give some ugly home-made looking shoes – Are we seeing the pattern here? Buy some ugly, homemade-looking shoes. Take the branding off wherever it may be. If you can get some shoes that are both ugly and uncomfortable you’ll be able to really sell it that you made them yourself.
- No more suggestions, I’m doing too much work. In the spirit of this post, I’m going to link out to someone else’s list and make it my own by saying just buy this same crap instead of making it and either detag or relabel everything. You’re honestly lucky I posted anything at all today since it’s Christmas Eve and I’m late to start drinking.
Merry Christmas!
-MG
