Lightening Online

My Sister-in-Law had a birthday recently. She’s a leap-year baby so it’s not very often that she gets to celebrate her birthday on it’s *actual* day.

We usually don’t *do* presents with our adult siblings. With Farmboys family we did for a number of years but me in my perfectionist ways allowed it to stress me out far too much. I was always wanting to find the perfect gift for each person. In the end, we were the ones to say we were pulling out of gift giving for adults. We weren’t in a position to keep buying things that may or may not have been useful or loved by the recipients and neither were the rest of his siblings. It was left that people could do token gifts or whatever they liked but that no-one should feel obligated.

In my family, well, my brothers never really got into gift giving much and I decided at one point it was best to stop giving them gifts as I didn’t want to make them feel guilty or obliged to return (one of my brothers is really good at piling guilt on himself). By this stage we’d started having children and it’s much more fun to focus on the kids when it comes to gifts.

Obligation is a funny thing when it comes to gift giving. We all say that no-one should feel obligated to reciprocate but mostly people do (feel obligated that is).

It has been interesting to lift this obligation and experience the joy that comes with a more spontaneous type of giving. I really wanted to send my sister in law a small gift this year. I didn’t feel obligated to spend a certain amount of get a certain value in a gift.

Instead, I was able to focus purely on the love behind saying “we’re really glad you were born. Happy Birthday”.

Here is what we sent her.

It wasn’t an expensive gift but it was made with lots of love. I hope that she was able to see it for what it was intended. An expression of our love for her. More time was put into these than it would have taken to earn the money for quite a large box of chocolates.

What do you value more? Something handmade with love or something costing a reasonable amount of money?

How do you handle birthdays in your extended family? Do you feel you have to buy out of a sense of obligation? Do you find it hard to continually come up with ideas for adult siblings birthday gifts?