Jim Bunny Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

It was one of those charming and memorable moments – although I didn't appreciate it at the time. It involved a Christmas gift – a powerful and thoroughly considered one.

Now…I was the second of two boys – I suspect I was meant to be a girl. That would have been the ideal nuclear fluffle down the warren – the buck, the doe and two fluffy tails. One of each.

When that didn't happen, another boy arrived, and a fourth. That's when mother resigned herself to a life of war comics, pools of boy piddle on the toilet floor, and an endless succession of flibbertigibbets as my old man called them – flighty young things who talked too much, or not at all. And they would never be good enough for Mum's boys.

Anyhow Mum's disappointment ran quietly deep. She loved her boys but she would have gladly sacrificed a pair of football boots for just one frilly petticoat and some plaits.

Dad understood it. And so the very next Christmas he produced his magnum opus, his inspired idea. It was a large, rectangular, perfectly-wrapped present for Mum - a print of Mary Cassatt's famous ‘Sarah in a Green Bonnet' – an impish, little red-head staring from the depths of this huge green hat. The note read: ‘The little girl destiny decided we would never have'.

It worked. Mum's lips quivered, the tears welled and she sobbed. Later I would catch Mum staring up at Sarah on the wall and reflecting what could have, should have been. The present that kept giving.

Then there are the crap gifts. A friend made a desperate dash to the Ware-Whare to get a present for his wife – a honey who had delivered him three lovely children and was long-suffering. I was there Christmas morning when she unwrapped the gift. Well, it unwrapped itself. It fell apart in a tangle of string and cardboard and coat hanger.

She was gobsmacked, mortified, and with quaking voice asked the obvious: 'What is it?”

'A shoe rack,” replied husband, as if she couldn't figure that for herself. She could figure, she just didn't want to. Cue tears of utter disbelief and disappointment. 'Why John? …..why?” John didn't know why. Moments later wife marched onto the deck and hurled the offending present into the garden below. The marriage didn't survive.

Some presents are thought about, but not thought through. A smart thinking friend recalls her first Christmas present as a married couple being a kitchen appliance. 'Well that wasn't going to define the terms of the marriage – my contribution to this relationship wasn't going to be in the kitchen.” There was some grown-up discussion, and the appliance was returned and replaced with something of sentiment. It was a close thing, but the couple remain a happy, adjusted, functioning unit.

Another bloke tested his wife's love by giving her a squeegee when they had some novelty value many years ago. She cried. Husband didn't understand. What the hell?

A mother got her daughter a jewellery box even though the mother knew her daughter didn't wear jewellery, didn't own any. What was she thinking? Mother bought jewellery boxes for four other sisters and thought, by right, she should have one too. 'I use it for USB sticks,” says the irrepressibly positive friend. She also has a box of unused or unusable Christmas presents like two books on end of time theology. She should read them soon. And no – she can't on-gift them or give them away because of the 'guilt thing”. My friend is too sensitive. To hell with Christmas goodwill, unclutter girl!

Then there were the cats. Just because she owned a cat, just one cat, and she loved her cat the mother-in-law, bless her memory, thought cats were the only thing in her life. So at Christmas the cat-themed presents started rolling in – china mugs with cat images, oven mitts with cats on them, and cat earrings. It was enough to give you fur balls. Anyhow the cat gifts were given with immeasurable amounts of love and received the same way. Purr-fect.

My big turn-off at Christmas is a gift card. Someone doesn't know what to buy you, so they pass the decision making problem on. That's not Christmas good will, that's not love.