January 13th, 2010 | 
Author: I must admit…I’m a gift klutz. I guess it’s not really that I’m bad about the giving part, itself. My problem is that I have an impossible time deciding. I’m just awful at coming up with original gift ideas. My solution, as you may have guessed by this time, is the Internet.
The Internet is full of the usual and the unusual when it comes to gift suggestions. Of course I know that a lot of the people making suggestions are actually trying to get me to spend my hard earned Money. Actually, I don’t even object to that. I figure if someone can help me solve my gift quandry, then they deserve to make a profit from my purchase. I’m an American, and we think of that as patriotism.
Where else except the Internet could I have learned that I could send my mom a New York style cheesecake instead of the same boring chocolate cake I usually sent her? Fortunately, I can stretch this one idea out for many years simply by changing the flavor of cheesecake from one birthday to the next.
My daughter, who apparently gets her creative gift giving skills from me, found a jewelry idea for her aunt (on the good side of the family–not mine). While it turned out well for her, it made me jealous!
You can find gift ideas by searching for age groups, say teenagers (with whom I most the most trouble) and children. You can also search using your favorite search engine by looking for gifts for a particular occasion from Bat Mitzvahs or Easter, birthdays to graduations, or even what I lovingly refer to as the “Hallmark holidays,” such as Valentine’s Day or Sweetest Day or take your terrier to work day. If you already have the beginnings of an idea, which is already one step ahead of me, you can conduct a search for a product category. You might be inventive enough to know that you want to buy Cousin Martha a scarf, so you can check out which ones are most popular or unique or are the greenest. You might know that you want to buy your neighbor some accessory for his newly restored 1957 Chevy convertible. You can actually search for specific parts for that sort of thing. The possibilities are mind boggling for me.
Indeed, there are entire websites created for gift klutzes just like me where people publish ideas. It seems that they have so many ideas they can afford to give them away. If you happen to be one of those sorts of blessed people with too many ideas to use yourself, please put them online so that I can find them or you could just send the item directly to me and I’ll forward it to my favorite recipient. Thanks, in advance.
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