GIVING AND TAKING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23685, 17 December 1938, Page 29

GIVING AND TAKING

The gentle art of giving a present, and the equally important art of receiving one, is often neglected" (says a writer in Home Chat).

•Many grown-up people spoil their gifts by giving them ungraciously while others are either too clumsy, too shy, or too stupid to know how to receive them.

A dear friend of mine gave me a set of dinner-mats the other day; they were lovely ones which she had chosen very carefully to tone in with my dinner service. 1 was thrilled with them until she said: " I thought yours were looking so shabby!" So you see, instead of feeling flatterea bv her thought for me, I was secretly rather offended. I couldn't bear to think that I had used shabby tablemats the night she came to dinner and I felt guilty at not having honoured her visit with a new set. In short, the result was that her gifi just because it was accompanied by a tactless speech, rather depressed me! Another woman I knew did not know how to receive a gift gracefully although in every other respect she seemed a delightful person. I was taken to see her by a young girl friend of mine. On the way. my friend stopped at a flower shop. She is a girl with whom every shilling counts, and I could see that her generosity and her common sense were having quite a fight over a bunch of chrysanthemums at one-and-sixpence and some roses costing four shillings Finally, she chose the roses—which she presented to her friend saying: " Just a few roses, darling!" Her friend murmured: " Thank you so much," put the flowers down on a table behind her, and promptly forgot about them. We stayed lo tea, and we stayed to have a glass of sherry with her husband, and still my littlt friend's roses remained wilting on the table behind our hostess's chair. I noticed the poor child growing silent, and I knew that, trivial as it might seem to some people, she was wishing she had bought the chrysanthemums or nothing at all! Accept your gifts with a real appreciation, and please give them prettily. If you give a new note-case to your boy friend, there is no need to mention that you thought his was looking shabby. It is almost as bad as giving someone a box of toilet soap, and saying: " I thought you could do with it!" Don't just say the conventional " Thank you so much " for a gift at the moment of receiving it —say again, a

little later on. how pleased you are with it. These little niceties make life so much easier to live, and people like to know that their presents and the thought which was expended upon them are really appreciated. Remember also never to praise the quality of the present you give. I know a man who always tells people that the thing he has given them is the best of its kind procurable anywhere! There are others who go to the other extreme and, intending to be modest, say: "It's just nothing at all —only a cheap little thing."

Another friend of mine always describes her gifts as " Just a little something!" Perhaps she has struck the happy medium, though I don't think one need ever do more than hand the parcel over with a smile!