My six-year-old son Kevin is a happy guy come holiday time since he gets to reap all the rewards of the amalgamated Christmas-Hanukah smorgasbord our family celebrates (the result of my husband and my interfaith marriage). As winter approaches, Kevin begins to cover all his bases by submitting his gift requests to both Santa Claus and Santa’s lesser known sidekick, Hanukah Harry.

Meanwhile, I find myself perusing my children’s playroom and looking over the ravages of last year’s gifts. Here’s the pterodactyl robot Kevin so desperately wanted and eventually received. This reptilian beast provided a great deal of excitement when Kevin first figured out how to make it shuffle around the house like a prehistoric Frankenstein. However, despite the fact that the pterodactyl was initially awarded the “greatest toy ever” label by Kevin, the novelty of the latex-skinned toy wore off, and Terry the Pterodactyl began to show signs of wear and tear. Now, a year later, the pterodactyl’s wing hangs limp by its side, and its rubbery skin has been duct taped so many times that it resembles a toy version of Michael Jackson. In short, the pterodactyl has all but been put out to pasture and now joins the ranks of Kevin’s other toys that have suffered inadvertent abuses at his hands. I look at Kevin’s pop-up books that have lost their “pop,” for example, the ones whose card board inserts have been yanked out. I look at several of Kevin’s plastic toys that he got the impulse to mummify by wrapping them over and over again in Scotch tape.

Then, too, there are those toys that I have personally eviscerated--the ones whose beeping or repetitive phrases have made me feel as though I might lose my mind if I didn’t remove their innards or yank out their batteries tout de suite. As a general rule, those toys that are the absolute noisiest tend to come from friends or family members who don’t have children of their own and don’t realize that a toy that sings a song over and over again will not so much warm the cockles of your heart as drive you to utter insanity. These well-meaning friends and family members are the same ones who send you toys that contain five hundred separate parts. Let me just say that while it may seem quaint to have a miniature Lego pirate with removable hair, the chances of that pinky fingernail-sized toupee staying paired with the pirate’s bald pate are slim to none. We have a series of Lego pirates who have a host of missing body parts and not even a peg leg to show for it.

From all this ranting, you might get the impression that I am a gift-giving Scrooge. Not so. For all the toys in which my kids have lost interest— the boy doll whose clothing has gotten misplaced, thus turning him into an unwitting nudist; the phonics toy whose batteries are constantly running low, making its recorded voice sound like that of a drunken old man— there are a few gifts that have withstood the test of time. Kevin still totes around his dog-eared book on How to Draw Dinosaurs, and he follows the step-by-step instructions with a dedicated tongue-out-the-side-of-his-mouth concentration that makes my smile. There is the book My Truck is Stuck that my younger son Avery still reads, smiling delightedly each time as I get to the onomatopoeia of beep beep and vroom vroom. There is the stuffed penguin Kevin sleeps with every night. Out of all of his many stuffed animals, the penguin is inexplicably the one with which Kevin has bonded.

Gifts do mean something to children, and there are some that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. Gift season also reminds us of our own childhoods. I can still remember the jelly beans my brother and I used to receive at Hanukah, the ones we used to count out as if we were divvying up a set of crown jewels; I still remember the tiara that my mother’s best friend Alice gave me when I was in my ballerina phase; I remember the magical marionette puppet I received from a family friend, a puppet whose disjointed limbs seemed as though they might suddenly spring to life at any given moment.

In looking at the gifts we love, those that become meaningful in some way, we are reminded of those who gave them to us. It is for this very reason that we buy gifts for others. So go out and make your purchases, not only because it stimulates our economy but because, for every gift that you can no longer stand and try to pawn off on your younger nieces and nephews, there will be a few gifts that you will hang on to forever.