It’s officially late November, which means a bunch of holidays are coming up, and often, with holidays come gift exchanges. If you’re a car enthusiast, that often means opening a series of completely random gifts that involve cars in some way. The intent is nice, but considering how many of those gifts go unused or get donated, we would like to make one simple request this year — please, we’re begging you, stop giving us generic car gifts.
If you’re just a regular person with normal interests and hobbies, we understand it can be hard to figure out exactly what your friend, coworker, loved one or family member is specifically into. Especially if they aren’t extremely vocal about what kinds of cars they like. And yet, often, no car gift would be better than a random car gift. The fact that something has a car on it doesn’t make it automatically desirable after maybe middle school or so.
Just think about your own interests and hobbies. There’s what you actually like, and then there’s the much broader category that those things fall under. If you’re a big fan of “The Office,” how excited would you be to get a t-shirt with the cast of “Full House” on it just because that person knew you liked sitcoms? Not very? Yeah, it’s basically the same thing with car stuff.
It isn’t even fully your thought as a gift buyer. Consumerism wants us to buy into the notion that more gifts are better, they’re supposed to be a surprise and cash or gift cards are lazy gift-giving. It makes sense that you’d want to find something physical to give, and it’s not like cars aren’t neat. They are! We just don’t want literally everything that has a car on it or happens to be car-related. Not because we’re snobs but because no one really appreciates that kind of thing and then when it doesn’t get used, we feel bad that you wasted your money.
Sadly, getting thoughtful gifts is more difficult than simply buying something random, but as long as we’re talking about adults here, the best approach is probably to ask them directly. It might take some of the surprise out of it, but who cares? It’s much better to get something you know you’ll appreciate than to be surprised with something random.
That said, I don’t know if any enthusiast would ever turn up their nose at a gift card to use on new tires. Every car needs tires, and even if they last a long time now, the good ones sure are expensive. There’s nothing sexy about tires, but that’s you can always throw in a silk robe if you insist on giving them a sexy present, too. Unless they do find tires sexy, in which case, might I interest you in some Bibendum merch?
