Let’s Get Physical

No offense to any iTunes gift-code givers out there, but gifts gotta be physical. You gotta wrap the thing. You gotta hand the thing over. The recipient’s gotta unwrap the thing. It’s gotta have thing-ness.

Technological advancements in media, for all the good they’ve done us, have really fucked gift-giving up. It wasn’t that long ago that a couple CDs was a solid gift, no pun intended. It must sound nutty to the youngsters, the idea of physically giving someone a chunk of polycarbonate plastic with music on it. (It gets even weirder, whippersnappers: That chunk of plastic had its own durable plastic case with a little paper pamphlet inside where all the metadata was printed!) Such Christmases probably seem as distant to Kids These Days as those upon which Laura Ingalls got her corn cob doll and fresh orange.

But music, movies, books — these were go-to gift categories, and they served us well.

Now what? Your dad picks a book out for you and you just notice it already on your Kindle or some shit. Nothing to unwrap. The machines failed to make our offices paperless, so they came for our gift exchanges! It’s some bullshit. Then again, would you rather he gave it to you physically printed out on paper and bound, like how the Neanderthals used to read?

Here’s a compromise. It’s audiobooks. But they come on a thing. Not much of a thing: a little 32GB flash drive. Is a flash drive the most convenient or efficient mechanism for transferring media in this fantastical age of modern marvels? Nah, in fact it’s kind of clunky. But it’s something to unwrap, and the books contained thereupon can still be played on a phone, or whatever other twenty-seventeeny device the recipient uses.

And then the inexorable march of progress can ruin some other thing about holiday time. Fruitcake-flavored Soylent, anyone?