Waiting until the last minute to shop for Christmas, hoping that deflation will make gifts more affordable? Short of cash after the market crash?
Idea #1 (if unemployed): Visit Project Gutenberg, download a plain text copy of your favorite book, and email it to a friend as an attachment with “Merry Christmas” in the subject. Authors of today are but literary midgets compared to the giants of American Literature, such as Edith Wharton (start with House of Mirth), so why pay $20 for a book whose merits will be scant next to the works of Henry James, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and others who inhabited this continent before we decided that public school teachers should be certified and unionized. For a foreign author whose work is timely once more, try Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.
Idea #2 (if employed): Use your company’s laser printer to print out a copy of your favorite book from Project Gutenberg. Collect some pine needles from the nearest tree and tape them to a cover sheet. Take bus over to friend’s house and give to friend.
Anyone else have a good idea for a last-minute Christmas gift that won’t cost big bucks?
Re: #1, if you prefer audiobooks, LibriVox has a collection of volunteer-read public domain audiobooks, including some great classics:
http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?title=&author=&status=complete&action=Search
Excellent listening fare during commutes.
Cardboard and a permanent marker.
I “upcycle” clothing and clearance printed bed sheets into throw quilts for friends and family, but I have quite a bit of free time.
I’ve always felt that time was the most valuable gift of all. Time to share a drink. Time to clean icy walkways. Time to help organize a messy bookshelf. Time to bake a pie together. No matter what your net worth, we all allotted precisely the same amount of precious time per week.
Make a cone cow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cow
Since it’s hand-made by you, you can act like it’s a truly great personalized gift rather than a soulless manufactured industrial product. Or a frigging pine cone with twigs in it.
I love C23’s comment of making cone cows for children and then spending time to help them creatively modify and extend the concept. Be careful of the pine cone sap though.
Also David’s comment about the gift of time. Offer to give a massage, take over some chores/housework, babysit, prepare a meal, etc. — you can create gift coupons for such offers.
I started downloading etexts and reading them to my kids. Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, etc. Truly wonderful works. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is controversial to this day, but what an amazing work!
And the kids loved it. Sophisticated, high-level English with wonderful stories and great writing techniques.
By the way Phil, I’ve been reading your stuff for years. I have a copy of the ugly green book with the cover you hate. Your sounding decidedly hard-core libertarian these days. Have you gone through a change in outlook recently? I hope you don’t mind me asking.
Scott: Have I become a libertarian? The French say that if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart and if not a conservative at 40 you have no mind.
My thinking since 1993 has changed. In both 1993 and 2008 I thought that it was a tragedy that our public school system didn’t educate children to their full potential. In 1993, however, I thought of it as a personal tragedy for millions of young Americans who would find themselves with crummy jobs for the rest of their lives. I also mourned the spectacular waste of funds by various government programs that paid hundreds of thousands of people to do almost nothing (starting with public school administrators!). I did not connect the dots, however, with the revolution in container shipping and telecommunications that would bring us a global economy. I expected only that some of the hard-working Americans would have to work harder to carry coddled government workers on their shoulders. And that those Americans who managed to educate themselves in spite of our public school system would have to work harder to carry the uneducated.
What has hit me in 2008 is how fragile a country’s economy can be in the face of international competition. In the comparatively closed economy of 1993 (trade was 6 percent of GDP?) we could survive handing out all of this cash to the unproductive and politically connected. Eventually the money would find its way to supporting American industry. Nowadays the money finds its way to whatever countries have the best educated workers available at the lowest prices. A big part of having workers available at a low price is not having a government that is handing out trillions of dollars to its cronies, retired railroad workers, etc.