My conversation about Christmas gifts with my boyfriend this year went something like this:
Me: Of course I don’t mind. I think presents put too much pressure on couples.
Him: Yeah, well, it’s mostly that I’m broke.
Me: No, no. I like that you’re not concerned about monetary exchanges as a way to express our love.
Him: Yeah. We can just cook each other dinner or something.
Me: Dinner sounds great. Absolutely great.
What I really wanted was a pair of diamond earrings, but I figured I could wait. True love could help me wait; we’d been dating three years, what was a few more? That is, I thought this until I heard about my sister’s Christmas day conversation with her boyfriend of eight months. It went something like this:
My sister: Steve! That’s so cute. A teddy bear.
Her boyfriend: There’s something in the pillow. I sewed it in there myself.
My sister: A ring! With three diamonds! Yes! I’ll absolutely marry you. Oh, life is beautiful! Come here and hold me in your adorably muscled arms.
My sister’s fiancé: I have something else. (Reaching into his pocket). This is a pair of diamond earrings to go with the ring. Just because.
My sister: Thank you. I’ve never really wanted a pair, but these are great. Just great.
My sister is four years younger than me. She is tall, beautiful, and—as of this Christmas—engaged.
Jessi had not been able to come home for Christmas because of her high-end retail job in the upscale neighborhood of Bridgeport, Connecticut. I, being a twenty-seven-year old writer and graduate student (neither of which constitutes a real job in my family’s eyes), was easily able to get time off to make the fourteen hour drive home in my 1992 Toyota Corolla (that my boyfriend swears, inexplicably, requires Cheez-Its in the gas tank to run. How he came upon this solution, I won’t go into). So, while Jessi was trying on her new ring, I was spending Christmas dinner with twenty-five of my closest relatives all crammed into the tight quarters of my parent’s “cozy” house.
We received my sister’s phone call around dessert, and by the time after-dinner coffee was served, we had pictures of the ring emailed. Somehow I got stuck amidst the pilgrimage of family members making their way to a viewing on the large screen of my parent’s bedroom computer. It was like I was the guardian of the gate, and everybody had to offer up some bit of advice or commentary in order to make passage.
“Looks like you’re an old maid now,” my uncle joked. I laughed at that one. It was the first ribbing, and I could see how someone might think it was funny.
“Always a bridesmaid,” said my aunt. I laughed at that too. It was a traditional saying, after all.
“Better hurry up and find yourself a husband or you’ll never catch up,” my mother said. Now that was unfair. I already had a boyfriend. I wasn’t entirely hopeless.
“Didn’t you try this once?” Another uncle. I had been engaged briefly before. “She let that one slip away,” my father informed him.
I could handle the jokes, though. They didn’t bother me because I was unequivocally happy for my sister and not ready to get married myself. But it seemed rather unfair to me that she’d got the earrings on top of the ring. That was just excess. Nobody needed that many diamonds at one sitting.
Fortunately, my parents had also bought me a pair of earrings for Christmas. They were a large pair of garish garnets, and I wore them home to my loving, non-gift-giving boyfriend.
“Those are hideous,” he told me.
I told him to shove it since he hadn’t bought me a pair himself.
“If you take those off, I’ll buy you diamonds,” he said. “You look like my Aunt Bertha.”
