A Millennials Guide To Gift-Giving, When You’re Poor AF This Christmas

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Christmas is a time for giving, but it’s also a time that gives me the shits.

In every glossy and on every blog, December is an excuse to promote buying excessively expensive and unnecessary items. Magazine pages are full of designers detailing what they are getting their friends for Christmas and it always involves oodles of cash.

A $240 dollar shower mat which comes in the colour ‘seafoam’? A collection of porcelain fruit statues from that Famous Homeware Guy? Or even a necklace made from pure gold that’s inlaid with Sanskrit script that reads ‘I’m a rich bitch’. RRP: $945.

These articles kill me because I am what the marketing guru’s would call a millennial (I don’t need to include the adjective ‘struggling’ because it’s already assumed). We can’t afford houses or cars or proper food (except smashed avo), apparently – refer to any Daily Mail article that rips into a young celebrity wearing short shorts. And we definitely can’t afford Christmas.

But I ain’t no grinch, and you shouldn’t be either. But you also shouldn’t be buying a faded dusty rose curtain set studded with Swarovski™ crystals for your step-sister.

This year, broke AF millennials have a gift guide and it’s right here:

FOR YOUR OLDER SISTER: She says she wants something from Mecca, but you know what she really wants? For you to stop wearing her clothes and saying that she has no boobs.

Instead, sift through the bargains at JB Hi-Fi and see if you can source a copy of New York Minute for $3 dollars. The nostalgia she’ll experience while watching it will soften her and remind her about how you two used to pretend to be Mary-Kate and Ashley, and maybe she will stop stealing your perfume for a while.

FOR YOUR YOUNGER SISTER: The best present you can get her is deleting SnapChat off her phone. Maybe give her some of your old scrunchies too, in a little gift bag from the $2 dollar shop. Nailed it.

FOR YOUR OLDER BROTHER: Honestly, the best gift he can get is you not being passive-aggressive to his new girlfriend (“You’ve balayaged your hair? I’ve never heard of that – how exotic!”). Maybe throw in a Jay Jay’s shirt, or grab a pair of his shorts from the laundry and wrap them up: he truly wouldn’t know.

FOR YOUR YOUNGER BROTHER: Just food. That’s it. All he does is eat anyway. Get 12 Kit Kats and chuck ’em in a box. 12 whole KitKats will blow his damn mind.

FOR YOUR DAD: All dads want for Christmas is for everyone to shut the hell up for two seconds, so they can sleep on the couch on the afternoon of the 25th, after eating two bowls of custard…just custard. Pre-election, I would’ve said to get him a hilarious baseball cap that reads ‘Make America Great Again,’ but the joke is over and it’s horrifying now, so that’s out.

You’ll probably need to give something a bit more tangible: an old book about aliens could do the trick. If that fails, get him a giant Toblerone. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT get him anything from Bunnings. You’ll pick the wrong thing and it’ll wreck his day. Who knows what’s going on in that brain of his?!

FOR YOUR MUM: Often the hardest one to shop for, what do you buy for someone who washes your clothes on the daily, but also goes ballistic at you for leaving your cups in the sink? You have a few options: you could hit up Spotlight and buy a tiny floral cushion; or you could bake shortbread for her and put it in a decorative fabric bag?

But you don’t have $20 dollars to spend, so it’s CraftTime™. Grab some wood from your dad’s shed out the back, hammer/glue/I have no idea how to make it into a frame, but do that, and then paint it. A lovely, wonky, home-made photo frame, made by her child in their twenties. It will bring a tear to her eye; not sure if it’s for the right reasons though.

FOR YOUR PARTNER: Last year, you got away with saying ‘I’m your gift,’ and you both had a laugh and they forgot that you didn’t get them anything. That’s not going to work this year.

I love hearing about couples who do the whole ‘coupon’ thing, God bless you all, but I have no intention about committing IN WRITING to do the dishes. So, for your other half this year, be honest. Say that you can’t afford anything. Maybe cook them a breakfast, a nice smashed avo. You’d usually go out for that, but y’know. Millennials.