Stranger Cakes

During my brief, long-ago career in mass market romance fiction, the month of December was given over to angst-ridden meetings about which authors should receive which holiday gift selections from Hotel Chocolat.

The chocolates were an unmistakeable communication of each author’s place in the pecking order. Bestselling writers and the rising stars would receive luxury hampers and cards full of effusive praise. Meanwhile, authors who were past their heyday got an incremental annual chocolate downgrade, culminating eventually in the kiss of death: a budget selection of cherry liqueurs and an invitation to discuss their contract.

This practice was unlike anything I had ever encountered in academic publishing (no chocolate budget to speak of there!), and was certainly not in the spirit of giving as I understood it.

But, of course, the spirit of giving is defined differently across social groups. For some communities, the value of gifts is in the reciprocal exchange: a symbolic commitment to respectful mutuality. For others, the only true gift is one given freely, with no expectation of anything in return.

As long as everyone is on the same page, gift-giving practices can strengthen bonds and generate good feeling all around.

But any time you’ve got a mixture of conventions, traditions, and assumptions about the meaning of gifts, misunderstandings and hurt feelings are inevitable.

This time of year is difficult for a friend of mine, who has an unusual aversion to homemade baked goods. A parent offers round seasonal fairy cakes at the school gate; a neighbour wants to tempt him with handcrafted mince pies; in the office kitchen, someone has left a plate of snowman cookies, with a note saying ‘Enjoy!’

‘Stranger cakes,’ my friend calls such festive offerings, with a shudder.

He traces his horror of Stranger Cakes back to his childhood, when neighbours in his small rural village would drop in unannounced, bringing iced buns mottled with their grandchildren’s grubby fingerprints, or dusty biscuits with dog hairs baked in. My friend was made to eat them whether he wanted to or not, so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

‘It’s how they show their love,’ his parents explained, as he fought the rising of his gorge.

The lesson he took from this was that other people’s desire to give trumped any feelings he might have about receiving. That he must endure others’ expressions of affection, however aversive they may feel, and he is not allowed to say no.

So it feels like a lot is at stake - his very bodily autonomy - when his well-meaning colleagues offer him their pumpkin spice muffins.

When he politely declines, and they persist: ‘Go on. Live a little!’

When he still declines, and they pout, saying ‘But I made them specially!’

And even though my friend recognises that this is just a pantomime of hurt feelings, it feels close to the bone. He feels vindicated in his unconscious belief that gifts are tools of social domination: an offer you can’t refuse.

We each have our own versions of the Stranger Cakes narrative, where the giving and receiving of gifts are concerned - and if we look closely at our feelings about gifts, and the meanings we give them, we can learn a lot about our relational histories, and our habitual feelings about our role in the world.

We might be poised and ready to be disappointed by the gifts we receive: nobody gives the amount of thought to our happiness that we give to theirs.

We might have high hopes, and feel crestfallen when they are not met: we are destined never to get what we want.

Sometimes, like my friend, we view gifts with deep suspicion: we are being tethered by obligation and guilt, freighted with other people’s emotional needs.

We might feel anxious that our loved ones are ‘hard to buy for’: we feel inadequate, unneeded, with nothing of value to offer.

All of these feelings have their roots somewhere in our real relational experiences.

The romance authors were not being paranoid when they opened their holiday cherry liqueurs with a sense of doom. The bitter chocs were, in this case, a genuine communication of intent.

But for some of those authors, the gift would have taken on other meanings that felt grimly familiar. It would have pressed buttons for them to do with previous experiences. They might have thought, every gift I ever get is backhanded and humiliating. Or, it was only a matter of time before they recognised how worthless I really am.

By contrast, authors with happier relational histories might open the same cherry liqueurs, recognise what they signify, feel a twinge of disappointment, chuckle to themselves at the publisher’s need to communicate obliquely through ominous gifts like an organised crime syndicate, and merrily regift the chocolates to a neighbour or relative.

We can see, from the example of the publisher’s chocolates, that there are people and social groups that do weaponise gift-giving.

If we have had these experiences in our families of origin, in our communities or schools - if gifts were used to stir up competition, to shame or punish us, to bring us strictly into line with others’ expectations - this will affect how we interpret any gifts we are given now. It may also affect the spirit in which we give gifts, as compensation for, or continuation of, historical dynamics of control and domination.

As we head into highly charged experiences of giving and receiving, of seasonal surfeit of presents and presence, here are some things to think about, that might help you hold steady.

• A gift can serve as a helpful physical boundary between your emotional experience and another person’s

• You can accept a gift, and decline the meanings you associate with it

• You can accept a gift, and decline the meanings others may want to give it

• Once you give a gift, it enters into another person’s system of meaning making. The giving may have a meaning for you - but its reception is outside of your remit.

• You can only be clear about your own intentions.

Finally, this is a time of year when everyone is going to be in their feelings to some extent or another - and a great time to remember that feelings aren’t facts, thoughts aren’t facts, and we are adults with autonomy and choices.

I hope you all manage to have a restful break, whatever and however you may or may not be celebrating.

I’m celebrating getting over the hump of the winter solstice, and the promise of brighter, longer days to come!