Friday, December 11, 2009

Present dilemma

In the world of dilemmas, I feel mighty blessed that this problem is the biggest one I'm trying to solve right now. But still it is on my mind and I thought I might get some feedback.

It's about Christmas presents for my nieces and nephews and making sure we treat everyone equal (or at least that they feel they are treated equal). My youngest niece doesn't live in the area and is only 9 months, so I'm not really worried about her (but her present is going to be fantastic anyway). For my other 4, I'm worried that one niece will feel left out. She is getting a Hi.gh Sch.ool Musi.cal Wi.i game. She loves HSM and I'm sure will love this game. But her siblings are all getting physically very large items and so I'm worried that she will look at this puny little package and wonder what is up.

My oldest niece is getting one of those chairs you plug an ip.od into and listen to music and play video games. Normally this is relatively expensive, but we got a fantastic Bl,ack Fr.iday deal and so it cost what we planned to spend on each niece/nephew. The 2 and a 1/2 yo nephew is getting this thing he can ride on. My older nephew wants a ping pong table. I'm cutting a piece of wood to fit over their air hockey table and then giving him some paddles and a net to get a homemade ping pong table and still allow them to play air hockey. Again, not super expensive, but very large and will involve 3 packages to open.

To make it more complicated, we were offered 4 tickets to a professional football for our area team playing Christmas evening. The people who would most enjoy this are my BIL and older nephew, so we are going to take them. So my nephew is going to feel like he is making out like a bandit on Christmas.

One solution is to give some of the packages/tickets for my nephew as an early birthday present (his birthday is February). Another solution is to give my niece my old digital camera. She asked for one, although is a little too young for a digital camera, but since I'm getting a new one it wouldn't be a big deal to give her mine. But this would also just be an escalation of the present-giving and so is maybe not the best lesson to be teaching. A third solution is to give the ping pong paddles to my niece as a present. This would reinforce the message that they have to share and play together (although my sister and BIL are good at this already). A final solution is just to put everyone's name on everything, except for the tickets which only one of them can go to. Or maybe some combination of the above.

What do you think? Or am I over-thinking things?

On a more serious note, what my niece wants most for Christmas she is not going to get. She wants an American Girl doll that is made to look just like her. But apparently if you have black curly hair you are not really American and there is no option to get a doll that has hair like hers. There is actually only one option for any doll with black hair (which is basically their slave doll from the historical collection that is dressed in modern clothes). I find this horribly furthering the stereotype that all black people look the same.

2 comments:

  1. I don't know what your niece looks like but you can order American Girl dolls with different skin, eyes, and hair (color and texture). I definitely agree that there is a lot more selection for light skinned girls/dolls, which is way lame. But here's one you might look at: http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/ProductPage.jsf/itemId/1282/itemType/DISPLAYGROUP/webTemplateId/3/uniqueId/86/saleGroupId/127
    Good luck! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is hard to know what to do about the presents. We are dealing with a similar issue. Hopefully the wii player will know that games can be expensive!

    Good luck.

    ReplyDelete

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