Show Your Love With Music
I demand a better approach to gift exchanging between significant others on holidays. I’m tired of the “How much should I spend?” and “What do you really want?” conversations. I’m tired of the superficial nature that inevitably surrounds the custom of exchanging gifts. There’s always that tenuous balance between spending a lot of money and having an epiphany as to what the person would really love deep down in their soul.
The problem, of course, is bucking tradition. It’s not easy, and you need a really good plan in order to pull it off without looking like a jerk. So I had to come up with some requirements.
- Both parties have to enjoy the process implicitly
- At the end, both parties should have received something they will truly enjoy
- It should be thoughtful, not expensive
- The process must require both parties to carefully consider their personal knowledge of the other
After some careful consideration, I came up with what I consider to be a winning idea… Give each other a CD! But in order to meet the stated requirements, there would have to be some rules:
- It must be an original, full-length album – Remakes or live albums are great, but for this purpose an all original, as the artist recorded it and intended it to be heard version is what we want
- It must be given in a physical format – Maybe I’m archaic, but I prefer having the album artwork and all of the trappings that come with purchasing an album in a physical format… plus, this makes each of us actually go somewhere and find a unique item (which is fun)
- It can’t be an album or by an artist that the other person has mentioned or talked about significantly – The point is to use your deep, personal knowledge of the other person’s tastes to introduce them to something they’ve never experienced but that they’ll like
At this point I’m really, really excited to see how this turns out. Who knows, it could be the start to a tradition!