A Beginner's Guide To Passive Aggressive Gift Giving.

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat (and so are you, but don't worry we'll deal with that in January.)
 

It's a well-known fact that suicide rates sky-rocket around Christmas time and this is almost definitely due to the stress of having to be around people you love and also buy them things. In Britain we have a time honoured tradition of ritual suicide practised by family members who have disgraced themselves by buying Mum the Dan Brown novel she's already read for Book Club. This is why I will be converting to the Jehovah's Witnesses on 24th December, but before I do, let me help you get through the holiday season with as little blood shed as possible. (NB: This does not involve simply switching to cyanide pills instead of the chainsaw you were going to use to disembowel yourself.)

Personally this is what I want for Christmas. To be immediately discarded in January, of course.

This year you won't have to kill yourself to avoid the awkwardness of giving someone a gift they are mildly indifferent towards. So be smart and survive the season (literally) by reading my go-to guide on purchasing Christmas presents for people you don't really like or who you think are okay but feel kind of resentful towards for having to spend time and money searching for something they probably don't really want anyway. Don't go to Lidls without it!

1.  MUM AND DAD

Sure, they gave you life, but what have they done for you recently, huh?

This year I wanted to give my parents something special, something unique that money couldn't buy. This was partly because I am a staunch anti-capitalist and I'm banned from John Lewis after stealing a wine rack in a radical protest against the bourgeois system of oppression. Also, I spent a lot of money on shoes this month so there's not much left over for anyone else.So this year, Mum and Dad are getting something straight from the heart that doesn't require me opening my wallet.

Having been taught to weave on a 16^th century loom by my mentor Rumpelstiltskin, I set to work on creating the kind of gift that you just couldn't buy from John Lewis (those fucking bastards). After painstakingly hand-stitching the opening line to Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse' – they fuck you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do – in Comic Sans, of course, I then went on to illustrate several (seventy-eight) traumatic key moments from my childhood right through until adult life. I like to think of it as a little Bayeux Tapestry of guilt and recrimination which will look lovely in our living room. 

We can't all be artists, but I am, and this is awesome.

For those of you who are struggling to find that something special to show your parents how much you resent them and question all the decisions they made when raising you, here are a few handy tips:

• Never buy individual presents for your parents. Even if they're divorced. Even if one of them is dead. Buying separate gifts makes it look like you think of your parents as actual people rather than the ATM machines we all know them to be. Except my bank doesn't usually criticise my expanding waist line and ask me when I'm going to get a real job when I withdraw cash.

• Don't  make the gift too personal - choose something generic that old people are into. For example, last year I bought my mother some denture toothpaste. She was very grateful and she's put it in a safe place so when she gets dentures she'll be ready to keep them sparkling clean. 

My personal recommendation for the perfect present to show your parents exactly what they mean to you is a copy of my latest novel, I Will Never Ever Forgive You: The Tragic True Life Tale of a Small Child Whose Mother Was Too Drunk To Read A Bed-Time Story To Him That One Time (available from any retailer with taste, published by Why Won't Anyone Else Publish Me? Press.) I suggest annotating your copy heavily, leaving notes in the margins letting your parents know how deeply you relate to the main character's plight and how being abused by a nonce was quite a lot like when you were seventeen and they used to pay you £10 to mow the lawn every two weeks. 

2. SECRET SANTA
   
   

Here I am DJing at last year's Christmas party. We listened to a lot of Leonard Cohen that night.

Secret Santa is the bane of every office worker and is actually a sneaky anagram of SATAN SECRET. This is no accident. The origins of Secret Santa actually go way back to the middle ages, when a group of monks decided they were totally over Jesus and began secretly worshipping demonic forces in exchange for small presents that cost no more than £5. The tradition has been carried on into our modern times and as such, every time you receive a Secret Santa present, you are actually making a pact with a demon who now owns your eternal soul.

Try explaining that at the office though and everyone thinks you're a spoil-sport. Or kind of weird. And maybe they stop talking when you walk into the room now. And maybe they all go out for lunch while you're in the toilets so they don't have to ask you along and you come back to an empty office and you sit alone at your desk, weeping silently, and wondering why it's so difficult for you to make friends. So take my advice, suck it up, say goodbye to your immortal soul and buy them something. 

May I suggest my newest Hypnotherapy C.D, So You Fucked Up Your Life: How To Come To Terms With Knowing That You're Stuck In This Dead-End Job Forever and Would Probably Be Better Off Dead. It's a step-by-step guide with a hypnotic induction which will help you successfully detach from your situation and depersonalise until you are basically a human automaton mindlessly drifting through the days not caring that every moment your wasted life is slipping through your fingers. Whoever gets this gift is one lucky son-of-a-gun! May I suggest also purchasing a copy for yourself too?

Don't be that guy. Let me help you suppress all those pesky emotions.

That pretty much covers all the groups that I have social contact with, so if you're one of those weird, desperate, needy people who needs constant human interaction to feel validated, I suggest looking elsewhere for tips on what to buy the people you cling to like a tragic limpet, sucking the life out of everyone around you until they're as empty and shell-like as you.

Let me leave you with this little ditty to get you in the Holiday mood. Put on your Rudolph ears, shove your face full of mince pies and Yule log and let your tears flow freely into the litre of Brandy you're already half-way through.

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