Once upon a time, I gave a friend the gift of expired chocolate for her birthday and it was the worst. If you think of all of the positive reactions and feelings associated with giving a good gift, imagine the inverse of that and you can start to understand the feeling you get when you give a good friend expired artisanal chocolate. Instead of making someone feel like you put special thought and consideration into something that you thought would please them, you end up making them feel like an expired afterthought. Ugh.
Let me give you some context on this one. I started a new job in the fall of 2016 and for Christmas, I gave a few trinkety gifts to my coworkers including cute koozies, sassy coasters and some nice chocolate bars. These gifts were intended to let my new coworkers know that I liked them and valued the relationships that we were building. Anyway, I had some leftover tokens from that particular giving endeavor and decided in March (early March) to repurpose some of those tokens into a compilation of gifts for a dear friend’s birthday. In gathering the items, I failed to notice that the chocolate bar was expired.
As much as I would like to blame the ridiculous shelf life of artisanal chocolate for this gifting faux pas, I can’t. This was my screw up. The expired chocolate was just the cherry on top of what was already a sad grab bag of stuff. In an effort to deliver something, I cut corners and ultimately gave something worse than nothing at all…an afterthought gift.
I haven’t given a gift for the sake of giving something since the artisanal chocolate incident of 2017. In fact, for that same friend’s birthday the following year, I didn’t have a good gift to give, so instead, I promised to take her to lunch. Even that intangible promise was better than the bag o’ trinkets I had tried to pass off as thoughtful the year before.
The moral of this story is that sometimes nothing is better than something. What was an appropriate gift for new co-workers was a poor choice for a close friend. I learned that while it can be awkward to arrive empty-handed to a party, it can be worse to show up with an afterthought gift. Also, a word to the wise, always check the expiration date on perishables.
Photo by Daniel Fazio on Unsplash