In my little deposit box of Christmas memories, two years stand out in particular. The first, perhaps the most magical, was when I was 6. My father was in graduate school, and money was tight. I was a book-loving child, and there was never enough time at the library. So “Santa Claus” thoughtfully arranged to bring me a set of Golden Book encyclopedias. I’d already gotten Volumes 1 and 2 at the supermarket, but the rest were going to take months to collect with S&H Green Stamps.

But on Christmas morning, the rest of the books magically appeared in the living room, all the way to “wolves to zoology” and “Index.” I gasped to see all those volumes open and spread across the floor like a trail to enlightenment.

The second Christmas was the opposite. I was in my 20s, back in the living room of my grandparents’ farm in Nebraska. I had just come back from the experience of dire poverty in Central America: parasites, hunger and rapacious mortality, and it made me more jaundiced than usual. Back in Nebraska, it was another year of the gizmo. I watched as my extended family members opened package after package of single-use electric devices: one for popping corn, one for cooking hotdogs, one for making automatic omelets. I remember thinking that a single pan with a lid — already present in all of their kitchens — more than sufficed for these purposes. The gifts were in service to the merchants, a pointless obligation to move objects from the megastore on a direct path to the garage sale.

After a few years, my family called a truce. The grown-ups stopped exchanging gifts; we’d only buy presents for the children. After all, we said, what we all needed the most was more room in our closets, more freedom from clutter. But I realized that Christmas presents would continue to be an unanswered question in my life, especially once I had children.

For my parents, growing up in the Depression, Christmas presents fulfilled a need, like new shoes or school supplies. By the time I came along, it could be a heart’s desire, like a bicycle or my encyclopedias. But somehow, in the last decade or two, present-buying has become a competitive sport, with strange consequences. Television advertising instructs children to collect obsessively, whether Barbie dolls or Pokémon cards. Families, spread out all over creation, may not have a chance to spend time together between holidays, and don’t know each other as well, much less know each others’ heart’s desire — or true needs. Parents in broken families often compete in buying children’s affections through the sheer quantity and glitter of their gifts, even though the packages may be torn through in a moment and their contents forgotten in a week. Finally, the sheer volume of material consumer goods in our society has had the effect of devaluing many “things.”

It is interesting, then, to think of the Gifts of the Magi, from which the notion of Christmas presents apparently sprang. Gold, frankincense and myrrh were odd choices for a young child. Did anyone consider a rattle? The child certainly “needed” garments beyond swaddling clothes. But the gifts were anchoring ideas: gold to name a king; frankincense to commit a prophet; myrrh to announce the sacrifice whose seeds were already present at birth. Every year, when the children sing through all the verses of “We Three Kings” at chapel, the weight of these original gifts strikes me hard, once again.

My family’s gift-giving, like much of our daily lives, is the constant, sometimes futile attempt to recolonize a few square inches of meaning out of days that are brutally occupied by mass culture and commercialization. But there are moments. We recapture music — our own homemade music — by sharing carols with friends and family. Our parish buys Christmas presents for a community of homeless children, and I try to include my children in the action, stretching their imaginations to the reality of a child who wouldn’t have any presents otherwise. I consider this knowledge a gift to my children.

Each of our two children gets to request one big gift, something that wouldn’t happen on the spur of the moment. I usually get them something else as well, that may not “count” as a “fun present” in the same way as a desired video game or toy. Rilke wrote of “parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else).”

He may have been referring to presents that seem odd or lackluster to the recipient, but must be given because they hold deep meaning to the giver. Yet sometimes these are also presents that the recipient grows into — the book that acquires meaning through spending years on the shelf, the piece of music that teaches you to hear it over time. The Christ Child’s gifts were not “meant for somebody else,” but he did have to grow into them. They were gifts that envisioned and helped to shape who he would come to be. The best gifts are not reflexive reactions to the empty prompts around us, but a message to the person we hope to find.