I know that some of you out there enjoy giving and receiving neighbor gifts at Christmas time. In fact, right now you’re putting the finishing touches on your homemade, hand-dipped chocolates or your caramel macadamia nut popcorn balls before deftly wrapping them in cellophane and gold French ribbon and delivering them to snow-covered homes all over the block. If you’re one of those people, you may want to skip this post. But if you’re like me, and the thought of having to come up with a cutsey neighborhood gift every year makes you want to stab your eyes out with your scalloped-edged scissors, then by all means, read on.

When I was young I loved helping my mother make fruitcakes for our neighbors at Christmas time. I greased the little loaf pans, added dried fruit and pecans to the bowl as my mother whisked the batter, the kitchen smelling of nutmeg and cinnamon and candied orange peel. Later I helped her deliver the fragrant loaves, freshly wrapped, to families up and down the street. Years later, as newlyweds my husband and I made five kinds of Christmas cookies one evening while we listened to Christmas music and kissed each other under the kitchen mistletoe, then delivered an entire platter of cookies to our surprised next-door neighbor.

Back then it was fun to be in the community of neighborhood gift givers. But then we started having children and Christmases became hectic. When we moved into our neighborhood eighteen years ago, I reluctantly joined in with the gift exchange tradition. Every year I tried to come up with something delicious and clever and Martha Stewartish to give to our neighbors, but the pressure was excruciating. Someone had already cornered the market on the muslin bags filled with pistachios, the chips and salsa, the caramel popcorn. We got plates of cookies, bags of clementines, homemade toffee and fudge, a poinsettia (which I always killed in under a week), a basket of apples and pears, fresh jam and miniature loaves of bread, soup mixes, muffin mixes, pancake mixes. In desperation I stuck bows on bottles of Martinellis and left them on people’s porches—where they froze overnight and burst. Year after year my gifts were the lamest gifts on the block.

And I noticed something else: the neighbor gifts we received were piling up in the pantry, often going uneaten until I guiltily threw them out after New Year’s. So one year my neighbor and I wrote a letter to the other members of our neighborhood, inviting them to forgo giving each other gifts and attend a bonfire and hot chocolate party instead, where we’d collect money and donate it to a mutually agreed upon charity. That worked well for a couple of years, until the bonfire tradition fizzled out after our ward boundaries changed. But everyone on our street liked not having to give each other gifts so much that we’ve had an unspoken agreement not to exchange gifts ever since.

Except, some new people have moved into the neighborhood and no one has clued them in to our agreement, so little by little, the gift-giving custom is taking over the neighborhood again. Every time I hear someone drop something off on our porch my heart sinks and I want to run out the door and yell, “You’re violating the code!” But I don’t want to hurt their feelings, so instead I run to Target for bags of caramel popcorn and muffin mixes. Sometimes—and I’m not proud of this, mind you—I even resort to regifting, and the loaf of cranberry orange bread that Sister Green dropped off gets a new tag and goes right back out the door to the Browns down the street.

But one new neighbor in particular—I’ll call her Sharon—has made my life especially difficult. She’s a lovely woman but she enjoys giving generous, elaborate, over the top gifts that I can never compete with, and each year I end up feeling like a tightwad loser. So last week I did a preemptive strike and gave her family a tin of plain hot chocolate and some marshmallows, tied up in cellophane with a cute bow, hoping she’d reciprocate in kind. The next day, much to my dismay,  she delivered a holly-painted ceramic platter topped with a box of gourmet caramel popcorn, a tin of peppermint hot chocolate, a bag of chocolate covered cherries, and a small box of glass ornaments.

“You could look at it this way,” my husband, the businessman, said. “You could say you got an excellent return on your investment.”

That made me feel better, somehow, so I put the ornaments on the tree and we drank the peppermint hot chocolate and ate the chocolate covered cherries. And then I resolved to give Sharon something really spectacular next year. Next year for sure.

Do you enjoy giving/getting neighbor gifts at Christmas time or does it make you feel more stressed? Do you ever regift neighbor gifts? What is the worst/best neighbor gift you’ve ever received or given? Feel free to share any clever neighbor gift ideas with the rest of us.

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