A very manly and scientific excuse for last minute Christmas shopping

I finished my Christmas shopping on 23^rd December this year which left me with a little spare time to research an article on the “Five Reasons Men Love to Leave Christmas Shopping Until the Last Minute” for the Good Men Project. 

In the process I discovered several great scientifically proven excuses---I mean reasons---why men are more likely to put off buying presents until Christmas Eve.

The “reason” I most relate to myself for putting off buying presents until the last minute is performance anxiety. A 2008 survey conducted for Ocado by Karen Pine, a professor who specializes in the psychology of gift exchange, found that men are more likely than women to feel anxious about both giving and receiving gifts.

Reading this reminded me of Martin Seager’s Three Ancient Rules of Masculinity that suggests that men are driven by a need:

• To protect and provide
• To fight and win
• To retain mastery and control

In the realm of protecting and providing, I know I am prone to judge myself each year on the amount of money I can afford to spend on my loved ones at Christmas. And when it comes to mastery and control, I unconsciously compare my ability to buy people the perfect gift to other people I know (who in my head have a magical gift buying gene that seems to be deficient in me).

It’s a condition I may have inherited from my dad who bought my mum Tweed Perfume for Christmas every year from 1957 to 1987 even though she went off the fragrance in 1972.

If Christmas gift buying is a competition that I, as a man, must fight and win, then I guess I tend to react to it in the way I’d react to most fights---I want to run away and avoid them at all costs.

And so it is with Christmas shopping. I don’t have a great deal of money to provide great gifts for my family and friends this year; I don’t possess a great control or mastery of the skill of gift buying and if Christmas shopping is a competition to fight then I’m sure there’re plenty of people who’d beat me. And so I find myself each year fighting my urge to avoid Christmas shopping like it’s a playground bully who I want to run away from screaming like a Brownie.

I know myself well enough to understand that most personal skills (including buying gifts) are like psychological muscles that atrophy if you don’t stretch and exercise them.

Today I had an unexpected opportunity to work on my performance anxiety around purchasing presents when a friend made an offer on Facebook to play Secret Santa to any child whose parents couldn’t afford to buy many gifts this Christmas.

I nominated a dad from a support group I run for separated dads and it took some skill to make it easy for this proud father to accept “charity”. I know what it’s like to feel you can’t provide as much as you’d like; to feel you haven’t yet mastered being a father; to feel that when it comes to being the “world’s best dad” you may be fighting but you’re not yet winning.

Looking back on my own experience as a son, I’m not sure what my favourite Christmas present was growing up. The electronic keyboard I got as a music-mad teenage that was the most generous gift my dad ever bought me and my first leather football (we called them “caseys” in the Seventies) which cost a few quid but gave me hundreds of hours of fun fantasizing about winning the FA Cup for Blackpool. 

And more important than any of the gifts he bought me were the Christmas games my dad organized for us to play every year as these provided a context for our disparate family members to get together and interact. Almost every memory I have of my grandfather, uncles, aunties and cousins was gifted to me by my dad arranging party games at Christmas.

I guess when we look back on life we remember the good times and the good memories more than the good presents. I hope the unexpected present that our local dad in need graciously received from Secret Santa provides some happy memories for him and his daughter. 

And to all the men reading this, I hope you have a fantastic Christmas. If you haven’t finished (or started) your festive shopping yet, I want to reassure you that there’s probably a very good psychological reason for your procrastination, now for pity’s deal with it and crack on making some happy memories with the people you love.

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