Cyber holidays

I need a contraceptive from all these contraptions. I pride myself on being a D.I.Y. kind of girl… “kind of” being the operative phrase. The holidays have always been my way of thanking the people I love and those who have helped me through the years. Usually I think of a unique gift that I can give en masse.

Last week I prided myself on condensing my list to a very tight 15 items. Then I realized I forgot my friends from all over the world! Making the list grow to 45! So in a country where PayPal is still as experimental as stem-cell research, it’s been a feat to get all my gifts sent to my friends from India to London to New York! We’ve just recently been given the green light for PayPal, allowing us to say buh-bye to those P.O. boxes.

I started with my two phones. One carrier won’t send to certain countries for some reason and the other one has some sort of contraband effect in some other countries as well. So I’ve been shuffling between two phones hawking addresses in such haste that I hardly had a time to get paranoid about some weird tumor growing on my eye from being near such carcinogenic toys.

I’m eagerly awaiting the launch of Bianca Zobel’s new website called “High Maintenance” which carries boutique brands from all over the world. It empowers the local online shopper to get his or her goodies and more during those lonely insomnia attacks. It’s also a great tool for me to send unique gifts with a click of a mouse from home. In the Philippines.

For now, it’s good old Amazon. It’s been a tradition of mine to always pass along books. This makes it the perfect time and place to resurrect that tradition. For the rest, there is the exorbitantly priced but reliable Fed-Ex (can’t put a price on “quick and there,” you know) or 2Go which is great for local deliveries. You can actually send food from Iloilo over to Manila. A great holiday gift for nostalgic probinsiyanos at heart.

So last night I set up my makeshift NASA Mission Control Center in my bedroom to put my worldwide list through. I sent Amy Sedaris’s wonderfully eccentric book, I Like You, to all the great hostesses I know. (I love how she suggested you put marbles in the medicine cabinet for snoopy guests and not serve cranberry pie to guests who have acne problems.) For the bachelors, I sent Ric Marin’s colorful biography called Cad. It’s dick lit at its best. For the marrieds, I sent box sets of the first season of Mad Men in Blu-ray. It’s the most beautiful show ever and must be seen in the clearest way possible. It also reminds them how not to go wrong, the Yates way. Tsk, tsk. I also sent them a list of charities that they could donate to here in the PI. I find that this enthralls them the most. A lot want to do something altruistic for the holidays, but for the serfing class, the time crunch makes it almost impossible.

I know it sounds a bit clinical. However, it’s better than sending an e-card which was my first thought, feeling cheap and all. However, there’s nothing like sending a little something to those who have been angels in the year that was Apocalypto 2008. As I finished my list, I saw that, even in my seemingly distant attempt to imbibe the holiday spirit around the world, I had a lot of people to thank and a lot to be thankful for.