What do you buy a nearly 14-year-old daughter for Christmas? Does anyone know the answer to this question? That is the dilemma my wife and I are facing this December. Because it doesn’t appear there’s an easy answer.
The landscape has changed dramatically in just a year or two, and it seems all of the old standbys and easy go-tos have withered away. I’m not sure what they’ve been replaced by.
“What do you think we should get her?” my wife asked at lunch the other day.
“Get her?!?” I replied. “Shoot, I’m not even sure who ‘her’ is anymore!”
Any ideas?!? I don’t have any. Zero! I asked a colleague with older daughters what he does and he told me, “gift cards and cash, dude. Just go with gift cards and cash. Anything else and you’re ASKING for trouble.”
I don’t know anything about this age. This period in life. This is all new to me. When I turned 14, I think I was still playing with G.I. Joe figures and accepting bulk orders of Legos that needed to be delivered in dump trucks.
Times were simpler back then. There were things you could buy called cassette tapes or CDs when you wanted to listen to music. Remember that? You had to physically BUY them … AT A STORE! I wouldn’t even know how to buy music today. Normally, I just walk into my living room, say out loud, “Alexa, play so-and-so” and music magically appears out of the firmament for free. I don’t know how. I don’t know from where. I have a theory it has something to do with quantum mechanics, but I don’t actually know what that is.
Computers weren’t really a thing back then. When I was a kid, all I had was one of those early Nintendo game consoles that you needed game cartridges for. You bought these games at a store in a mall, or from a sketchy kid at school named “Nerd Bag.” He had Doritos perpetually gummed up in his braces and smelled like burned fish.
The graphics looked like they had been designed by a drunken mouse who had run across some slumbering programmer’s keyboard. On Christmas morning, you would unwrap one or two of these game cartridges, and then climb into your room like a bear retreating for hibernation, not to be seen again until April … when you would need more game cartridges.
There are no cartridges today. My daughter plays Sims or who knows what else on her computer, and she asks for expansion packs or “mods” or goths or jocks or some other term I don’t understand. You don’t go anywhere to buy these. I just pretty much walk into my living room and say out loud, “Alexa, buy so-and-so,” and then in the other room I hear, “Thanks, dad!”
Quantum mechanics, I assume.
You don’t hold anything in your hand. You don’t pass anyone money. I’m not even sure these things we buy actually exist. They’re phone apps or virtual-this or digital-thats. I half expect to see a Christmas list this year that requests cryptocurrency deposits in a virtual Swiss bank account.
Then the other day I got the shock of a lifetime. The answer to my dilemma. Unprompted, my daughter said, “You know what I want for Christmas this year? Some donations to wildlife organizations and anyone trying to stop poaching in Africa.”
The air wheezed out of my lungs, and I gave a little cough.
“Say again?” I said, after I regained consciousness.
“The world is dying, you know?” she said. “So that’s what I want.”
Dangggggg!
Yep, never expected that. And I can get behind it, too. The best part? All I have to do is walk into my living room and say out loud, “Alexa, give some money to people fighting poaching.” Then out of the firmament, thanks to quantum mechanics, it just happens.