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"  A lot of people like to say that they have trouble getting gifts. I have trouble giving them. It&amp;#039;s not out of a lack of generosity, mind you. My fallback is to go big, no matter what the occasion. In this way, I give gifts like I tip\u2014with a lingering awareness of what&amp;#039;s been left off the table, rather than on. I always think, &amp;quot;Hell, another fifty bucks isn&amp;#039;t going to matter to me nearly as much as it&amp;#039;s going to matter to them,&amp;quot; and so wind up spending money for the sake of spending money, and feeling simultaneously like a spendthrift and a tightwad. I am the guilty gift-giver, which means that I am a gift-giver who lacks all sense of proportion. I also lack a sense of imagination, which is at the root of my problems. Like most people, I like to give what I like to get. Unlike most people, I still like to get what I got in college\u2014books, magazine subscriptions, CDs, T-shirts. I simply cannot think of anything I&amp;#039;d rather have than a Roxy Music box set or a complete Library of America edition of Henry Adams&amp;#039;s History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. And so I can&amp;#039;t think of anything I&amp;#039;d rather give. (Hell, back in the nineties, I gave the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang twice\u2014as a wedding present. It came in two volumes, A-G and H-O. My wife and I promised P-Z as an anniversary gift, as it was supposed to be forthcoming. It never came, and so in the United States today there are two couples, still happily married, who know the ins and outs of obscure American argot, but only as far as &amp;quot;ozoner,&amp;quot; which was apparently what people called drive-in movie theaters in the late 1940s.) Still, my lack of gift-giving prowess never got me into trouble, at least not until trouble came the predictable way\u2014through a child. My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she&amp;#039;s hurt her parents&amp;#039; feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers. Born in China, she demonstrates the power of her vestigial inheritance by speaking the language of gift\u2014by using gifts to express herself when words fail.  I have always known that gifts are very important to her; what I haven&amp;#039;t always known is what to give her, because she doesn&amp;#039;t consider a book a real gift. She doesn&amp;#039;t listen to CDs any more than she would my collection of &amp;quot;classic&amp;quot; vinyl. For a long time, I was able to get away with buying her cool T-shirts from the restaurants, bars, and technology companies I visited when I was on the road, but before my last trip she told me not to get &amp;quot;another T-shirt\u2014I don&amp;#039;t really wear them anymore.&amp;quot; She likes both to give and to get spontaneous offerings, like cookies from Whole Foods and tchotchkes from the dollar store, but when she has time to specify what she actually wants, she only wants one thing: Electronics. Which leads me to the biggest crisis in my checkered gift-giving career. Last year, before Christmas, my daughter let it be known that she was asking for the device that was all the rage in her elementary school\u2014the iPod Touch\u2014and that she was asking it of us, since she&amp;#039;d just found out that &amp;quot;Santa is your parents.&amp;quot; We no longer could use Santa&amp;#039;s naughty-or-nice line as an out, so when Christmas morning came and went without an iPod under the tree, we had to explain that we didn&amp;#039;t want to give it for the same reason that she wanted to get it\u2014because it offered a sense of adult agency and freedom to a child still too young to possess it.  Yes, that&amp;#039;s right: It was the &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;ll shoot your eye out&amp;quot; defense, updated for the digital age. But I had seen Ralphie get his Red Ryder BB gun so many times on A Christmas Story that I never truly considered what would happen if he didn&amp;#039;t get it. Well, I knew now. My daughter was shattered. What might have been the best Christmas ever had turned into the worst. She asked us to return all the other gifts we&amp;#039;d gotten her. That didn&amp;#039;t last, but the pain of not getting an iPod did, particularly when she did Christmas postgame with her friends. They&amp;#039;d all gotten iPod Touches. She&amp;#039;d gotten a scooter and a bunch of other stuff. But what she&amp;#039;d really gotten was the Christmas she&amp;#039;d never forget. And so we did what any reasonable American parents would do: We gave in, sort of. We gave her a list of things she had to accomplish in order to prove that she was grown up enough for an iPod Touch. And she did them, with single-minded fortitude. Six months later, we couldn&amp;#039;t argue: She had earned what she&amp;#039;d asked for. She got her iPod Touch, and it was the best June 12 she&amp;#039;d ever had. Now she is like her classmates, like any other American kid: She texts, she takes pictures, she shoots video, she plays games, she listens to music, she watches Netflix. And all I can think, when her &amp;quot;electronics time&amp;quot; is up and I practically have to wrench the thing from her hands, is that I wish I&amp;#039;d bought her a book.  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/a26188/junod-ipod-touch-gift/>