Your gift-giving and receiving attitude says a lot about your love language

<p>I was cleaning out a bedroom closet this fall when I came across a few Christmas presents from 2017 that were inadvertently never wrapped and subsequently never placed under the Christmas tree.</p><p>Being a practical Midwest kind-of gift giver, I asked my daughter on one of our Tuesday “Family Dinner nights” if she liked a pair of black and off-white mittens, with button and embroidery embellishment and colorblock gray and maroon on the palm side. They had a tag explaining the proceeds went to ‘Mittens for Missions.’</p><p>Chloe immediately said, “Yes.”</p><p>I responded matter-of-factly: “Good, because I’m giving them to you this Christmas — I forgot to give them to you last Christmas.”</p><p>I will always naturally err on the side of unsurprising a gift to ensure that it is wanted and practical.</p><p>Which is how I found out that — “No, thank you,” — Chloe did not need a wooden cheese board, even if it was made by a talented Johnson County woodworker, because she received a quite nice one for her wedding a few years ago and it still works quite nicely.</p><p>Chloe is similar to me in temperament in that receiving gifts is not her love language — however, her two sisters do have the genetic predisposition of feeling loved when they even see a box with their name on it. I could give my daughter Alex a box with rocks in it and she would be overjoyed. Of course, if I glued gold sequins on the rocks, she love them even more.</p><p>I have attempted to not be so practical, but I can’t resist choosing shower body wash, razor blades or hair product because I know they will be utilized. My hubby has always been the impractical present consumer, showering our daughters (without my knowledge until Christmas morning) with absurd gifts like Barbie boats, electric motorized cars and go-carts.</p><p>I was in Menards last week when a woman in a motorized cart asked if I would kindly reach and place two boxes of Andes Creme de Menthe in her cart — they were on sale for $1.77 each. She told me she used them as stocking stuffers, which I thought was ingenious, because who doesn’t like those tiny individually wrapped chocolate and mint treats? I bought four, and as of this writing, I still have three left for stocking stuffers.</p><p>Merry Christmas present hunting.</p>