Every year around now, the pressure mounts.
What to buy.
Where to go.
What to wear to the holiday party that still requires heels but no longer offers valet.
We start trading lists and links, scanning shelves for inspiration that doesn’t feel like obligation.
And it’s not that I’m anti-gift. I’m not.
I love the whole business of it—brown paper packages, ribbon in an actual bow, the way the good tape cuts clean when you finally find the scissors.
But the older I get, the more I think the best gifts don’t go under the tree.
They don’t sparkle. They don’t ship. They don’t cost $39.95 plus express.
They’re quiet. Personal. Often unnoticed.
But they land.
And they last.
Like the gift of attention
Not the passive kind. Not “uh-huh” while scrolling.
Actual attention.
The kind where someone remembers your coffee order.
The book you mentioned in passing.
The name of your dog.
The fact that you were nervous about that thing and followed up the next day just to ask, How did it go?
We live in a world built for distraction.
When someone offers full presence, it feels rare. Luxurious, even.
No wrapping required.
Just your full self, pointed gently toward another.
Or the gift of remembering
I once had a friend who sent me a playlist every December. No big announcement. Just a message that said, “This made me think of you.”
The songs weren’t even current. That was the point.
Each one tied to a memory—our road trip in 2004, that awful house party in Kits, the brunch where we accidentally ordered oysters before noon and pretended we meant to.
It didn’t come with a card.
But it said everything.
Remembering is a form of intimacy.
It says: I noticed you. And I still do.
The gift of being known (even when you’re not at your best)
We all have people we only show the polished version to.
The rested, agreeable, decent-outfit version.
The one who says “all good” even when it’s not.
The one who laughs at the joke and carries on.
But then, if you’re lucky (and I am), you have someone else.
The person who hears the edge in your voice and asks, What’s really going on?
The one who sees you go quiet in a group and later says, You okay?
The one who shows up with soup instead of solutions.
It’s a gift to be seen when you’re not easy.
To be chosen when you’re not charming.
To be loved without performance.
The gift of letting someone in
We don’t talk enough about how hard it is to let people help.
We’re so trained to be fine. To manage.
To say, I’ve got it—even when we don’t.
But there is real generosity in letting someone carry a corner of your load.
Not because you couldn’t keep going. But because you don’t have to prove that you can.
Letting someone in is a gift to them, too.
It builds trust.
It deepens the friendship.
It reminds us we’re not meant to do this alone.
The gift of humour, especially when things are not funny
There’s a kind of laughter that doesn’t fix anything, but makes everything bearable.
The text during the meeting.
The private chat alongside the department meeting Zoom.
The side-eye at the dinner.
The shared absurdity of the fact that your car broke down again and it’s raining and you’re wearing suede boots and honestly, what else is there to do but laugh?
Humour, real humour—the “you had to be there” kind—is a gift.
It doesn’t sparkle, but it sticks.
It says, Even here, in this mess, I’m with you.
The gift of permission
This one’s subtle. But powerful.
It’s the person who says,
You don’t have to explain.
You don’t have to go.
You don’t have to answer that email tonight.
It’s the person who lets you off the hook when you were never meant to be on it.
The person who says, Rest, and means it.
Who says, I trust you, and doesn’t follow up with a spreadsheet.
Who says, You don’t owe me cheerful.
We spend so much energy trying to meet expectations we never agreed to.
Permission, real permission, is freedom.
And then there’s presence. Not the boxed kind. The real kind.
Presence is showing up.
Not with perfect timing or perfect words. Just with intention.
It’s being the one who reaches out first.
Who remembers the hard anniversary.
Who follows through, even when it’s inconvenient.
It’s walking beside someone even when you don’t know what to say.
Especially then.
It’s the text at 11:47 p.m. that simply says, Still here.
That’s the one that lands.
These are the gifts we don’t wrap
They don’t look impressive in a photo.
You can’t link to them or add them to cart.
But they’re the ones that stay.
They’re the ones people remember five years from now when they’ve forgotten what you bought them in 2022.
They’re the ones that feel like love, unbranded and unperformed.
And this time of year—when everything leans toward excess, toward volume, toward display—I’m reminding myself that small is still enough.
A note.
A moment.
A meal made with care.
A laugh shared when you didn’t know you needed it.
A soft place to land when the world feels sharp.
That’s the good stuff.
And you can give it anytime.
No wrapping. No shipping. No perfect timing.
Just a little attention.
Offered freely.
Held close.