Donna Freedman

Selling unwanted gift cards.

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Here’s my feeling about presents: Once they’re yours, you get to use them any way you like. If you want to regift it, donate it to charity, sell it in a yard sale or run over it with a steamroller, that’s your business.

Which is why I sold two of the gift cards I got during the holidays. They morphed from $75 worth of might-not-get-used promissory plastic into $63.79 worth of Amazon.com gift cards.

Some would look at this as an $11.21 loss. Not me. I look at it as being that much closer to the crib I need to buy.

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A note to Santa.

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My great-nephew is 10 years old. I expect this is his last year of believing in Father Christmas. No doubt he’ll return to school on Jan. 3 saying, “Santa Claus brought me a Kinect and two of the ‘Heroes of Olympus” books!’ and some cynical fifth-grader will reply, “Dude, your mom bought those gifts.”

This year, though, he still believes. Witness the note he left on the kitchen table.

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Strategic pizza.

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Last month I was fried extra-crispy: too many things to do in too little time before I left for a seven-week trip to Alaska. Will Chen over at Wise Bread did a telephone intervention, i.e., I sort of melted down while he was on the line.

Bless his heart – he didn’t start to make bad-cell-reception noises and say that he couldn’t hear me so we’d have to talk some other time. (Like, um, never.) Instead, he listened to me whirl and howl about so many things I wanted to do, so few days until my plane left, so many professional plans but no time in which to bring them to fruition.

Then he gently encouraged me to think about how I’m spending my time.

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Why gift cards work.

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My friend and former fellow MSN Money columnist Liz Weston really, really dislikes gift cards. She despairs of a world in which a shopper grabs a dozen plastic rectangles from the supermarket’s “gift card mall” and does a mental butt dance: Woo hoo! I’m all done my holiday shopping!

That image bothers me, too. Gift-giving should not come down to, “How fast can I get this over with?

Yes, I know you’re busy. So are a lot of people. But must generosity be reduced to a time trial?

That said, I think that gift cards can make good presents. It’s the intention that matters.

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