It was told to me through a friend’s writing that there is a fundamental difference between giving gifts to one’s children and giving gifts to one’s parents.

Gifts are meant to delight our children. To give glee and laughter, the fun of sensation, discovery, and games.
Or if the gift must be some useful thing, then it’s meant to educate the child, or to train, nourish, clothe, or keep him or her.

In either case, as much as we may love to give a gift, gifts to the child come of a parent’s duty. They come of love, too, certainly; but we choose. We decide what’s best – or else what’s permissible. And so we ought. It is our business to care for our children, and gifts are one element of that responsibility.

As parents we initiate the process – hoping they get the idea, of course, that selflessness and kindness and concern for others are all good things, worthy of imitation. We continue to teach them even when we give them things they do not need, things for their delight.

But to parents and grandparents we give back. They are the ones who initiated the giving long ago by giving first to us. In fact, they will likely need nothing we might give them. And if they do not need the thing we give them, then it is the giving itself which is significant. It is a remembering of things past. It is a closure to a love which they began, a solemn and holy circle. It is, therefore, wholeness to a relationship.

Giving gifts to our parents and grandparents is meant to honor them. It declares them honorable. It acknowledges by a visible act their worth. It enshrines them. They are revealed as the finest gift first given by God unto us, their children; and their earlier kindness now is elevated before ourselves and our community.

The giving of the gift says how important children, parents and grandparents are; how important they have been.