This week, all over Perry County, cars and trucks laden with wrapped gifts and pots of food will be delivering their passengers to two great holiday gift traditions: the exchange of presents and the potluck supper.

In the run-up to the holidays, as empty boxes from Amazon proliferate in the mud room and the bank account suffers its annual blitzkrieg, it’s easy to forget the deep roots of these traditions.

The potluck, for instance. What would seem at first glance like a sensible way to spread the labor and expense of a large feast actually has its roots in a Native American ceremony: the potlatch, which is the origin of the word “potluck,” at least in the sense that we use it today.

I suppose I learned about the potlatch in school, but that was a million years ago, and the most important fact somehow escaped me; i.e., that the potlatch was a ceremony in which the wealthiest and most powerful members of the tribe demonstrated their power and wealth by giving away their worldly possessions.

Or rather, redistributed them among their tribesmen. These gifts weren’t exactly as selfless as they sound. They served to reinforce tribal ties, and, in the language of supply-side economics, allowed resources that had concentrated in the hands of a few to “trickle down” through the ranks, and broaden the overall strength of the tribal economy.

Of course, this is a somewhat cynical modern American understanding of the potlatch. But the outlines are there, underneath the beautiful idea that the greatest demonstration of power is to give away everything you have.

The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age seemed to have absorbed this idea deeply. Even today, the life of an American titan of industry is often divided into two acts: the accumulation of the largest possible heap of lucre through means fair and foul; followed by the establishment of a gargantuan philanthropy dedicated to righting some of the wrongs in the system that allowed such wildly overblown “success” in the first place.

A gift isn’t always a gift. The word itself is subject to wildly different interpretations. A gift is supposed to be the transfer of something without the expectation of receiving anything in return. But that definition doesn’t really reflect our experience of the holidays, where gifts are carefully tracked, both for the purpose of “thank you” notes and also to ensure that the gift ledger between relatives or friends stays more or less in balance.

The invisible obligation that comes with receiving a gift can be a great source of anxiety. The Japanese, who, unlike English speakers, actually have a word for “the obligation that a gift imposes on the recipient,” have neatly solved this problem by making the value of a gift explicit, as opposed to hiding it by furtively scraping off the price tag like we’ve all been trained to do. Every year in July, during the gift-giving holiday of Chugen, the Japanese exchange gifts along very well defined lines, which include giving each other some very glamorous fruit. One favorite is a hybrid cantaloupe, the so-called Yubari “gift melon.” The Japanese are famous connoisseurs of this melon. Recently, a pair of them was auctioned for the equivalent of $16,000.

Which is a lot to pay for a pair of melons.

There are good gifts and bad gifts. The Trojan Horse springs to mind, a case where a seemingly magnificent gift — spectacular rolling horse sculpture! — turns out to have a belly full of murderous Greeks.

The holidays are a favorite time of year to trot out O. Henry’s famous short story, The Gift of the Magi, which on the surface seems to be a horribly ironic tale of mutual sacrifice: he sells his precious pocket-watch to buy her fancy combs; she sells her gorgeous long hair to buy him a fancy watch fob. So they each wind up with a useless gift, having sold off their great treasure. But in the end, the sacrifice itself is seen as an even greater gift.

I’m not a huge fan of the story, which ends by elevating the couple to the status of modern Magi, but it’s a nice depiction of two people rising above the materialism that grips us all so tightly this time of year.

It’s the holidays, and I don’t want to dwell on unpleasant matters, but I would like to mention that we’re a nation at war – two wars, actually. Those of you whose relatives are serving overseas are feeling this very keenly. I’d like to close with a wish that this season brings all of us the gift that passes human understanding.

Peace.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 23 December 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com