I always open Christmas gifts, espe­cial­ly from fam­i­ly or fam­i­ly friends, with a lit­tle trep­i­da­tion. It’s more of an oblig­a­tion than any­thing else for many peo­ple to give me some­thing, and I’m of the firm belief that if some­one isn’t going to like or have use for a gift, one should­n’t give any­thing at all. There’s no point to giv­ing some­one a stu­pid present, and it just ends up being worse than if one gets noth­ing. There are a few excep­tion to this rule, being the thought or effort put into the gift, although there is gen­er­al­ly none of either if some­one does­n’t like the present any­way. Sometimes it just ends up being the fact that the best inten­tions are used, but a gift isn’t need­ed to fig­ure this out.

Of course, I’ve been known as the hard­est bas­tard to shop for any­way, since I usu­al­ly buy what­ev­er I want. As soon as an idea is in my head for some­thing I’d like, I’ll research it for a few days and then go out and buy it. It ends up being very rare that I want to get some­thing I don’t have, main­ly due to the fact that my inter­ests are fair­ly sim­ple and afford­able.