Minor Issues: Why it's so hard to get gifts for Father's Day
It is much easier to find presents for Mother's Day than for Father's Day, because mothers almost always know what they want. ST ILLUSTRATION: CEL GULAPA
SINGAPORE – Happy belated Father's Day to all us fathers out there! We've made it through another year of finishing the family dinner leftovers, so we definitely deserve a big pat on the back (burp).
This Father's Day, my eight-year-old daughter, JJ, in cahoots with our seven-year-old neighbour, planned a surprise for the two respective fifth-floor fathers.
It was incredibly sweet and cute. It was also totally botched as they discussed it as stealthily as excitable kids are wont to do (read: loudly).
And it didn't help that weeks before Father's Day, JJ reminded me repeatedly that 'there's a big surprise coming up – but I can't tell you about it! I can't! I can't! I'm sorry, but I really can't!'
Of course, I loved the eventual surprise. And even more than that, I love JJ for it. May she continue to stupefy me poorly for many years to come (but not with a defiant pronouncement that she really loves her tattooed, teenage motorcycle-biker boyfriend named Skibidi Rizz).
Gifts from the heart
It is often lamented that Mother's Day has become sensationally commercialised.
Instead of celebrating all the milky goodness that is motherhood, Mother's Day has turned into spending money on pretty flowers, expensive jewellery, luxurious spa massages, hard-to-pronounce degustation smorgasbords and so on.
Gone are the gifts that are endearingly handmade and charmingly rough around the edges. You know, presents with heart.
Father's Day presents, on the other hand, have a lot of heart. The thoughtful, if ill-executed, surprises are always going to be fantastic.
It is when families heed the recommendations of businesses that it starts going south. A cursory glance at what retailers tout as 'the perfect Father's Day gift' will reveal that our options fall into three broad categories: gadgets (because we're into tech), leather goods (because we're into cowboys) and sports equipment (because we're into family dinner leftovers).
I'm not saying that we want expensive jewellery or pretty flowers too. All I'm saying is that it would be nice if, for once, our families could hear us loud and clear when we say that all we really want is...
Okay, we're stumped. We don't know what it is we really want either (but it's definitely not flowers... I think).
Gifter's nightmare
I get it – it is hard to buy stuff for fathers. Trying to imagine what colossally nondescript fathers might like for Father's Day is like pulling teeth.
And asking us outright what we want is like trying to push those bloody molars back into the sockets afterwards.
Instead of giving them a straight answer, we hem and we haw: We really don't need anything… Don't go to any trouble… We like this but it might be too expensive… We like that but we might not use it more than once….
It is just such an incredibly exasperating exercise trying to figure out the perfect Father's Day gift for us. So much so that we understand it perfectly when our families throw their hands up in the air and exclaim: 'Oh, for the love of gout, dad! I'm just going to buy you a kettlebell... again!'
And that is perfectly fine too. We will gladly take your kettlebell of love... but only if it isn't too much trouble, because a kettlebell is rather heavy to lug all the way back home. Maybe you should consider something more manageable. How about some pretty flowers?
Comparatively, it is much easier to buy Mother's Day presents, because, unlike fathers, mothers almost always know what they want.
They often refuse to reveal it explicitly to said fathers, but you can bet that mothers know exactly what it is they wish for deep in the milky goodness of their hearts. It is buried so deep that their lousy non-mind-reading husbands will never be able to unearth these secret desires. (But yet, not so deep that prescient retailers seem to be able to uncover these gift ideas ever so readily – all 8,000 of them.)
For the record, I am not comparing Father's Day with Mother's Day. I need to make this crystal clear, mainly because my wife will read this. But also because I acknowledge that the entire motherhood journey, which starts with a woman lugging around an unwieldy melon for nine months, is very, very hard.
In fact, if you ask me, mothers deserve, not one, but two celebratory days in the month of May.
The traditional Mother's Day that falls on the second Sunday of May is to fete her for being the patient, nurturing, all-around angelic multitasker that she is. And then we need an additional day to be allocated for the very fact that birthing a melon-size Homo sapiens through your privates is a next-level superpower.
The entire process of delivering a child is so ridiculously onerous that this second celebration should be declared a public holiday every year for all mothers to get some well-deserved rest.
We will do it early in May, and I've even got the perfect name for it: Labour Day.
Raymond Goh is a father of an eight-year-old and an editorial director with SPH Media.
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