Posts Tagged “gifts”

It’s winter. There’s no getting around it, denying it, bargaining with it, raging against it - it’s colder than a really cold thing. It’s also the “holiday season” when we get whipped up into a consumerist frenzy and fray our nerves trying to figure out what to give to whom and how much to spend doing it. And its the end of the year so all kinds of businesses - and charities - are trying to close their books and make their quotas. All of this collided in my inbox at work this week with this message that bought all kinds of thoughts and emotions.

Subject: PLEASE READ: This Years Holiday Drive

Happy Holidays All,

In the spirit of giving this time of year, Ipswitch employees come up with ideas every year to give back to the little ones during this holiday season. This year we are going to support Cradles to Crayons with their efforts to collect the following (in this order!!):

- Coats (new or gently used…sizes needed below)
- Socks (NEW)
- Undergarments (NEW)
- Pajama’s (NEW)

For newborns to pre-teenage children!! If you need ideas please ask me but refer to list below for the sizes in need…we can’t fill them all but anything helps!

	TOTAL	0-6 mos	6-12 mos	12-18 mos	18-24 mos	2T	3T	4T	5/6	7/8	9/10	11/12	14/14+	16/16+
Boys Winter Coats	2,532	287	128	95	137	106	173	208	320	294	151	203	331	100
Girls Winter Coats	2,417	259	121	90	152	101	148	176	316	306	133	185	330	100

They are also looking for “new and/or gently used” winter garments (boots, hats, gloves) for the same ages.

I am hoping every employee in Lexington can drop off one of the above (more if you can!) to my office and then I will deliver them all on December 14th to Cradles to Crayons in Quincy, MA. That gives you all 9 shopping days J

Thank you ALL for your generosity and kindness, as always!

Let’s look at the underlying need here - there is an organization in Boston that needs five thousand winter coats for children. Five thousand children in and around Boston don’t have winter coats. I don’t know if Cradles to Crayons are even trying to address the totality of local need. It’s not that big a city or even that big a state - this seems an appalling number. Look at the difference in impact those number make in this message compared to a more generic, “we need warm clothes for kids.”

There are about 80 people working at the Lexington office - that’s about 62 coats per person, an impossible goal to be sure, but fortunately we’re not the only ones working on this. I wonder if we would do better to concentrate on a single age group or a smaller goal that we might meet, like one coat per person.

I don’t have access to any “gently used” children’s clothing although I could probably try to gather some from friends. I shopped around online and found cheap but respectable-looking children’s winter coats - a puffy down coat in a small size can be had surprisingly inexpensively, and if you’re not picky about size or color, you can do even better - and ordered a batch drop-shipped to HR. I didn’t buy 62 coats, not even close, but I think I moved the needle a bit. If there’s a coat drive where you live, you might try these links or do your own search.

As soon as I clicked to confirm my order, I started to wonder if I had approached this the right way. It has become fashionable to link charity contributions very directly with the goods or services and even with the recipients. This is good marketing - you feel better about giving a winter coat to a cute kid whose name and face you know than you do giving a few bucks to an organization that works to clothe unnamed kids. Plus, it makes the donor less concerned about the money being eaten up by overhead costs.

If that coat you give is one your own kid no longer wears, that’s a clear win for everybody. But if you do as I did and spend money on buying, and then shipping, a coat which then has to be transported so it can be sorted and given to a child, have you really delivered the best charity return on your financial investment?

Did I take the easy way out when there might have been an even easier way that’s also better? Wouldn’t I have delivered more value to the needy by simply writing a check? I would have saved the shipping cost on the coats I bought, and if the organization wanted to use my money to buy coats, they probably would get a better deal in bulk than I did online, and if they want to use my money to buy office supplies or some other unglamorous necessity, would that in any way devalue my contribution?

Charity isn’t about the warm fuzzy feeling the donor gets, it’s about improving the situation of the disadvantaged. As I’m fond of saying, I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong, so over analyze as I’ve done if you like, but at the end of the day, just do something that helps.

At The Museum of Useful Things in Harvard Square, the answer is definitely, “yes!”  They will seal “anything that will fit” in a 16-ounce tin (probably aluminum, but you know what I mean) can for $4, using a wonderfully old and weird hand-cranked machine.  How cool is that?  They’ll even can things that you bring in from outside the MUT.  It might not be the most environmentally responsible form of packaging, but any gift wrapping that looks cool and makes the recipient work to get their present is a good thing in my book.  Plus, we get to laugh at that old gag about Prince Albert in a can all over again.

There is much to report and I’m already way behind, but I’ll catch up soon. We’ve heard that before, haven’t we? In any case, an overly agressive baggage handler at the Mumbai airport reminded me of two currency-related topics I’ve been meaning to mull. Well, I’ve been mulling them, but I haven’t posted the mull.

I had left the details of arrival to my colleague, but our assigned transportation either did not show up or we did not recognize them in the crush of taxiwallahs at the arrival point. Arriving in India for the first time after about fifteen hours of flight we probably had “wealthy, dazed and confused” written all over us but we knew enough to hire a prepaid taxi from the window, which we did with great success. 190 Rupees for a “cool cab” including luggage and service charges. Just go to the row of blue taxis and get in number 5943.

Heading to the taxis we acquired a crew (perhaps a quarter of a horde in number) of overly eager to serve (not necessarily eager to please) and not very official looking baggage handlers. For their service (or attempt to serve) they asked for “some coins” but I didn’t have any. Perhaps this was a figure of speech, but the smallest denomination I had was a 10 Rupee note, about 25 cents US. It doesn’t usually work to ask somebody hustling for tips if they can break a large bill. Indeed, Rupees come in coins as small as 25 paise (1/4 Rupee) up to 5 Rupees, but I haven’t seen any yet.

As the ancient taxi sputtered out of the airport lot, I thought about this. I’ve been complaining for a while that the US $1 coin is lousy and unpopular, probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that in most civilized countries, the monetary equivalent of US $1 is a coin, not a bill. I think (among other crackpot currency thoughts) that the US should dump the $1 bill and make a $1 coin worth using. Canada’s smallest bill is $5, ditto ₤5 and €5 (almost $8 now); in Japan you don’t hit paper until ¥1,000, almost $10. And there are 1 and 2 coins for Canadian Dollars, Euros and Pounds, plus 100 and 500 Yen pieces, too.

I figured that like holding on to the penny, holding on the $1 bill is all about pretending that the currency has a lot of value, that you can still buy something significant for $1 and that 1¢ makes a difference. This fits with the fact that in India, there’s paper down to 25¢ because in that economy, you can get something decent for that amount. In China and Hong Kong the paper money starts (and it did start in China, orginally) at 10 RMB or 10 HKD, about $1.25, and I think there used to be no 10 HKD bill and used to be a lot more small RMB bills in China, reflecting the changes in those economies. I’m not sure what the real costs and benefits are to the country of maintaining paper or metal money, perhaps some freakonomist has written a paper.

Or maybe pants in the US are already in too much danger of falling down, and the additional weight of more coins would cause a national epidemic of wardrobe malfunction.

In any case, the subject of pants has little to do with the other part of my currency thinking, which is the wedding gift. I was invited to a wedding this summer, which it turned out I could not attend, but I wanted to send a gift. Going to the registry and buying and shipping some plates or stemware or cruets or something seemed unoriginal and labor-intensive. Cash or a cash equivalent like a gift card was clearly the way to go.

Then things got tricky. How much? Nobody has good advice on this. I’m in good financial shape these days, but I don’t know the couple that well. The idea that the gift should correspond to the expense of the wedding itself ,whatever you think of that, makes little sense when you don’t attend. I eventually arrived at a general range and then I proceeded to complicate things for myself. I wanted to give money in an interesting and meaningful amount.

I wasn’t willing to give up all originality by giving cash. I wanted to give an amount that would carry some meaning, not so much in its magnitude but in a numerologically significant way. Every culture has lucky and unlucky numbers. Half the happy couple is of Chinese origin, and I know that 8 is a good number in China, so maybe a sum with an 8 in it, or ending in an 8. In East Asia you sometimes see prices ending in 88 the way you see 99 or 95 in the West. It’s easy to add 88¢ to the end of any amount to send a little message, and $88 isn’t a bad gift amount either.

But the other half of the couple is of South Asian family origin. I did some research and couldn’t find as easy a numerology except the vague statement that numbers ending in 1 were considered fortunate in Hindu circles. Again, easy to make a gift of $51 instead of $50 or $101 instead of $100. Would a gift of $101.88 do anything other than confuse? I’m not sure. How about $81.18? That has two 8’s for double happiness (always a good wedding theme) and some ones and includes 18, which is a lucky number in the Jewish mysic discipline of Gematria because the numberical value (every Hebrew word has a numberical value, the sum of the values of its letters which are also traditionally used as numbers) of “life” “chai” (as in “lechaim”) is 18. Now things are getting perhaps needlessly esoteric. I picture the couple writing out thank you notes (I’m sure these two will enter gifts in a spreadsheet) and coming to mine and asking “what the heck was that all about?”

Realizing that the number games were a lot more amusing to me than they were likely to be to the happy couple, and acknowledging the small but real risk at the recipients might be more fluent in numerology than I and that I might choose poorly trying to combine two systems, I chose a mildly interesting number (round dollars, no cents) and bought a gift card. I could tell that the store clerk was troubled by my choice not being a multiple of ten or 25 but she was a true professional and took my money.

Maybe next time I can send a large prime number of decent dollar coins.