As someone who’s raising two very different yet equally delightful children, I’ve found that being a good gift giver comes down to knowing your customer. If I were to flash back to this time last year, one child was dreaming of an Esquif red canoe; the other, a beauty fridge. The former I knew something about. The latter (as I was to discover) was something that resembled the mini-fridge I had in my college dorm room, but instead of a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale and Hot Pockets, it was designed to keep balms and lotions fresh, and these beautifully packaged unguents were PRIVATE/NONE OF MY BEESWAX.
As I approach my 14th and 18th Christmases with our children, it dawns on me that there are two types of gift recipients—those who have a passion, a superpower, a “lane” (if you will), and those who have yet to discover theirs. The first category is easy. Our son is one of these specialists who has always gone deep, and as a result he’s quite straightforward to shop for. When he was very small, he loved Thomas the Tank Engine, then cooking, and then eventually he started playing guitar. So Christmas morning has morphed from building elaborate wooden railroads to scraping fresh pasta dough off the kitchen counter, to some new guitar-effects pedal being put through an Allman Brothers–worthy workout just as my hangover from Christmas Eve is at its peak.
