Birthdays. They’re either full of welcome ribbon wrapped surprises and genuine thoughtfulness; the ‘p’s & q’s’ shortly follow, or full of brave faces and forced smiles when handed that vulgar looking present. A birthday per week is easy to cope with, because you have a huge run up to make sure the present is entirely chic, but its an entirely different roller coaster when you have four of your friends birthdays crammed into one short week.
After getting to grips with the mighty idea that we can, once again, only shop the windows when we go into town, and that our online baskets will remain virtual and not in our hands (four birthdays = no spending on ourselves), its time to move on and buy these lavish gifts. After a detailed snoop on various websites, the customary outcome is an absolute failure: seven more items in our own baskets and fourteen more on our wish lists.
There are many problems that come with buying gifts for others online, but here are our top dilemmas:
- Wanting to keep it all to ourselves (the biggest and most evil of them all)
When a perfectly wrapped gift, with hundreds of dreary miles under its belt, arrives at our doorsteps, we instantly allow ourselves a cheeky glance at the goods hidden away. But, once we’ve admired it close up on inspection, and felt the silvery material under our fingertips, we’re gone. Certain taunting thoughts will pass through our heads: not being able to hear the satisfying rip of the label coming off, the blister plasters we won’t be buying for wearing in those new shoes, and the satisfactory “I love that, is it new?!”, and the “ooh, where did you get that from”, comments from our friends. It’s at that moment that we will succumb to the pressure, and just like that, we’re wearing the present at work tomorrow.
- The struggle of finding anything half decent that isn’t going to leave our bank account blubbering at night
As much as we love our friends to the moon and back-enough to buy them a present on the day where everything is about them (therefore rudeness is not completely unacceptable)-we don’t want to spend thousands on them when we have to buy numerous other presents too. Even then, when we don’t have other people to buy for, it’s OK to be selfish and want to spend more money on ourselves just because we know we’ll love our new clothes. Friends can easily hate what you buy them, so we reckon the easiest way to avoid this is to go with something they’ve wanted for ages, or something cheap and simple. Besides, it’s the thought that counts, right?
- Quick & cheap delivery
After hours on end of searching for the perfect gift, we reeeaaally don’t want to disappoint our friends with excuses of why their latest must-have present isn’t in their hands right now. And, we reeeeeaaaally don’t want to be literally paying for the title we now have of the ‘Worst Friend Ever’, due to the overpriced shipping.
Once we take to our computers again to have another, much broader look, it feels like a million Nike Air Max’s later until we finally stop scrolling. Click. Now, we’ve come across Fur Pompom Keychains. Seen on the AW15 runway, they’re most definitely ‘in’, but it’s hard get to grips with the idea of having a Bunny on the end of our keys or staring at us from the zip of our handbags, as seen at the Fendi show at Milan Fashion Week. However, in this case, we really don’t think it’s as easy as it seems to be able to look down at our keys, see Thumper-from-Bambi’s tail, and not turn into a whimpering wreck.
Which is when that switch in our head turns on, when we realise that this is definitely THE rule to abide by when shopping online. This ‘Bunny Ball’ is the only present we could, and should, give to all our friends; we know for certain that we most definitely won’t be able to keep it to ourselves. By buying gifts that we’ll never use or actually want to wear, we’re literally writing our own fate when we sign for them at the door. No more of a guessing game of whether we will or won’t keep the present, from now on all we’ll need to do is wrap them up and give them away with love – and no regret.
