Celebrate!

Giftpeople's
Rissa
Winkelman
and Sandy
Nathanson.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

That

C24

pecit21

hatever the occasion — a formal
wedding, a special anniversary, a
declaration of love, an invitation
to an intimate dinner party, or a
sumptuous bar or bat mitzvah — the giving of a
gift is an important part of the ritual.
There are few acts that create more joy and satis-
faction when they are right, and more confusion
and disappointment when
they are wrong.
Gifts show the outside
world our own good taste,
sensitivity and generosity.
They show how we value
another individual and how attuned we are to that
special person's needs and desires. Weighed down
with all of this symbolic importance, gifts can also
be a source of great confusion for many people in
these waning days of the 20th century, an epoch

Theperfect present has
to match the recipient
and the event.

LINDA R. BENSON
SPECIAL TO THE
JEWISH NEWS

where the time-honored rules defining social grace
and gentle breeding seem about as quaint to many
as a career in blacksmithing or carriage design.
"People are forever writing to me and asking
what's the perfect present to give," notes Judith
Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, the maven of eti-
quette and good taste whose advice appears in
newspapers throughout the United States. "You
may hate the vacuum cleaner," Miss Manners
says. "So what do you do when your husband
gives you a new one for your birthday or anniver-
sary?
"Gifts are about thoughtfulness," she says. "It's
hurtful when someone we know intimately does-
n't give us what we want. The sad fact is that there
is no such thing as the perfect, all-purpose present,
of a color, utility and style to fit the size and desires
of everyone.
"If there was, we would all probably have re-