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created: 2025.12.21. 18:29 · modified: 2025.12.30. 20:37 ·  · license
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This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Not long ago, for my father’s birthday, I gave my parents new phones.

A gift doesn’t have to be something the recipient needs, but it should be something they’ll be happy to receive. As for whether my parents needed new phones, they’d needed them for quite a while. To me, both phones had looked like they were on their last legs for ages, but my parents insisted they worked just fine… Anyway, they were delighted with the gifts.

My father’s birthday falls near the end of the year, close to Christmas. That got me thinking: this year marks exactly 20 years since I received the Christmas present I remember most vividly.

At Christmas in 2005, Santa Claus gave me an electronic dictionary. It was the first electronic device I ever owned. It had a monochrome reflective LCD with a refresh rate of maybe 3 Hz, and hardly any features beyond a dictionary, notes, a calendar, and contacts. But I was probably even more excited about it than I was when I got my first MacBook. I remember spending days exploring every menu, writing diary entries in the notes app, and saving my friends’ home phone numbers.

I used a feature phone until I was an adult, and I didn’t have a personal computer until high school. So I kept this dictionary close for at least ten years. I think I even left it in the study hall to use when I was in high school. I learned so many words from it. Of the words I used in a seminar I gave in English last week, I probably learned more than half from that dictionary.

That Christmas had an unusual setting, too. My uncle’s housewarming happened to be scheduled for that day, so I received the present at his place. Little me could only marvel: “How did Santa know where my uncle lives??” Later, my parents Santa Claus told me that coordinating plans with the relatives kept changing the location, and figuring out how to transport the gift along with it had taken some work.

The funny thing is, I faced a similar dilemma this year. As I talked with my younger sibling about whether to risk having the phones delivered directly to my parents’ home or have them sent to mine and bring them up myself, I realized my parents must have had a similar conversation in 2005.

Exactly 20 years later, our roles had completely reversed. Of course, I still rely on my parents in some ways, but it was a moment when I realized I’d grown up enough to give them gifts, at least now and then. And isn’t it fitting that the electronic dictionary and the smartphone could each be seen as a defining electronic device of its time? The difference in what they can do made me feel just how much time had passed.

There’s one more happy memory I want to share. At the end of 2003, my family went to Bangkok, so I received my Christmas present during the trip. That year’s gift was a magic drawing board—a fairly fancy one, with a lever on the side that, when pulled down, would slowly spring back up and erase the whole drawing surface at once. I got a lot of use out of it, drawing whatever I wanted and writing things down as I learned them. But what struck me most that day wasn’t the gift. It was the letter that came with it. The letter was a whole page in Thai! It had never occurred to me that Santa might be from another country, so I was dumbfounded—in a good way. I probably went to my parents to tell them all about this strange and wonderful thing. I must have been quite astonished, because I still remember bits of it even though I was only five.

My parents had actually written the letter in English and asked a hotel employee to translate it into Thai. Receiving that letter and gift remains one of my most treasured memories. Someday, I want to do something like that for my own children—or come up with something even more imaginative.

The funny thing about gifts is that you put all the care into giving them, but later, the ones you remember are the gifts you received. It’s not as if I’ve never given anyone a gift, yet the ones that come to mind are all things people gave me. When I’m the one giving, I worry about whether the recipient will like what I’ve prepared. But when I’m receiving, it doesn’t really matter what it is. I’m simply grateful that someone thought of me and picked something out. Recently, someone gave me a plush toy. I’d never been interested in plush toys before, but I liked it so much that I’ve put it on the back of my sofa at home. A gift of something unfamiliar can also become a chance to discover something new. To my elementary school friends who gave me a Pentel mechanical pencil for my birthday in 2012: did you know I still use it? I liked it so much that, even though it’s broken a few times, I’ve gone out of my way to buy the same one two or three more times. I even used it for a quantum computing exam recently.

Maybe because KakaoTalk makes it so easy to see and keep track of birthdays these days, gifts that arrive unexpectedly seem to mean more to me than ones given on occasions like birthdays. To return to that plush toy: a senior colleague in my lab bought it while attending a conference abroad. I was supposed to go too. I’d submitted an abstract, had it accepted, and even finished writing the paper; all that was left was to fly out. But something absurd came up, and I couldn’t go. It was the first international conference I’d gotten into since starting my degree, and my colleague thought of me, unable to attend at the last minute, and brought back the toy. I was so grateful for the thought.

In a world where everyone is busy just managing their own lives, remembering someone when it isn’t even their birthday takes thoughtfulness and effort. As the year draws to a close, thinking about the people like that in my life warms my heart all over again. I want to try harder to be that kind of person, too.