Years ago my mother received a handmade gift from a friend of hers. It was a fringed poncho crocheted with florescent bubble-gum pink acrylic yarn. So blinding was the color that it was not wearable, even if you were a poncho person, which my mother was not. However, the giver had actually made it herself and and seemed unaware of its flamboyance, or maybe liked that about it. It was a sincere gift meant to please. Mom, of course, accepted it with many thanks and admiring comments about the handwork; then it disappeared and was never seen again. In my mind, though, it lives on as a symbol of the thin ice of gift giving.....the vulnerability needed to offer a part of yourself to someone else, and the burden that the gift can lay upon its recipient.
I think about the pink poncho when when I make tablecloths for other people. The truth is that I make them for myself. Designing linens and setting tables makes manifest my intense yearning for home, beauty, connection and love. In my life these things come together most clearly when friends and family gather with me to share a meal. The combination of food, setting and people satisfies my need for rootedness in time, place and community. So what I do is about me, but the sharing part is an essential element. I like fooling around with textiles and would probably do it no matter what, but my creative light dims appreciably if I have no real-life situation at which to aim it. Having a specific occasion or place to enhance is the kick that gets me out of my chair and into action. The urge to include others in my vision is so entwined with the vision itself that gifts are the inevitable result.
I make and set tables for my own dinners, which is part of the gift of entertaining, but I also take the dishes of my loved ones (with their consent, of course) and make linens to go with them for each of the four seasons. When I am finished they get the linens and I get photographs of their table so I can document what I made. They receive large, custom-sized linen undercloths and napkins (a nightmare to iron) and four or five runners and squares, some hand-dyed and extensively embroidered, with various accessories like vases and napkin rings. When I hand these over, the first thing people ask is "how long did that take you?" because the effort involved is evident and prodigious. Each dyed piece takes months to make and even the plainest undercloth and napkin set takes weeks to accomplish. I don't care about the time because it is something I want to do, but there is no doubt that I am offering a big hunk of myself. This creates a sense of obligation because gift giving is almost always reciprocal in some way. It also makes demands on the recipient's time and space for care and storage. Finally, it asks for at least the appearance of appreciation. What if, when you bestow the results of your heartfelt effort, the receiver doesn't like it? Pink poncho!!!
For all the realization that what I do is for me, it is also aimed, with love, at the needs and preferences of my receivers. I do hope my offerings will please them because I love them and want to make them happy. The chasm of embarrassment that opens before the Receiver of Ugly Gifts has its echo in the mind of the giver who imagines that reaction in her targets. If the receiver doesn't like what I have made, it is only a burden and not the blessing I hoped it would be. That makes my effort a mockery....of me. Stupid, tasteless, deluded me. Oh, the cringing.
Of course, I have my own criteria with which to measure success and even if the receiver doesn't like what I have done (which would never be said to my face) I know if I have accomplished what I meant to do. That makes the chasm much shallower. When I engage other people in my projects it adds so much energy to the undertaking, but I always remember that I am asking as well as offering. Its a double-edged poncho.