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"  I stopped buying gifts a few years ago, when my son decided that he had enough stuff, and my wife and I agreed that getting each other presents for birthdays and wedding anniversaries (we had never celebrated Valentine&amp;#039;s Day anyway, since we both saw it as a dollar-driven candy-and-flowers joke) after more than a decade of amour fou was silly. It&amp;#039;s all our money anyway\u2014hers, mine, and the kid&amp;#039;s, too\u2014and we&amp;#039;ll need it for real eventually, and maybe sooner than that. It&amp;#039;s not a blanket policy. If the kid wants a video game, he gets it. If Patti Smith puts out an album, I&amp;#039;ll order it for my wife. And she always finds something cool\u2014a family photo collage, a symbolic trinket, a book\u2014to give me on my birthday or our anniversary. I&amp;#039;m okay with that, I guess. I&amp;#039;ve always been a clod with the small yet meaningful material gesture. The first present I recall buying my wife was a Bang &amp;amp;amp; Olufsen boom box, which set me back $1,400, although it could&amp;#039;ve been the $500 sterling-silver Swiss Army knife from Tiffany&amp;#039;s. I now view such things less as tokens of love than as symptoms of manic episodes. Though it may also be a lazy, loutish thing: Why craft a poem or a wooden box\u2014ladies do love little boxes\u2014when you can swipe a plastic card in exchange for precious metals? Frankly, I&amp;#039;ve been uneasy with gifts since one Hanukkah when I was no more than six or seven years old. My parents gave me a toy six-shooter shortly after my cowboy stage, and I remember, or think I remember, feeling awful about their failure to grasp that I had grown beyond such things. I felt sorry for them and much sorrier that they didn&amp;#039;t know me better, didn&amp;#039;t understand the real me. I hid my disappointment from the poor souls the best I could, preferring to nurse the grudge like the good little drama queen I must&amp;#039;ve been.  Still, somehow that sense of outsize Hanukkah tragedy held a valid insight: Gifts, however innocent their emotional provenance, can be treacherous, for the giver and recipient alike. I&amp;#039;m thinking specifically of the brooch I gave my first wife for our tenth wedding anniversary\u2014another Tiffany&amp;#039;s item, encrusted with diamonds\u2014two months before I fooled around for the first and only time, fell in love, and blew up the marriage. No children were involved, and our divorce was amicable\u2014a word used in no other context\u2014yet I hadn&amp;#039;t the chutzpah to seek custody of the goddamn brooch.  To the world beyond my front door, I give and heartily recommend cash for every conceivable rite of passage, with the possible exception of aging parents&amp;#039; anniversaries, which are no concern of mine. Cash is and always will be king, as close to the milk of human kindness as gifts get\u2014particularly when nieces, nephews, and such depart whatever passes for a nest these days. When old Ben Franklin whispers, &amp;quot;I love you,&amp;quot; everybody swoons. MORE: Read the rest from our illuminating, occasionally infuriating, and simply exhaustive guide to giving, originally published in Esquire Weekly, here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/news/a26141/raab-treacherous-gifts/>