Christmas gifts and relationships

Here on Christmas Eve, that great day of consumer spending, the Courier-Mail has some practical advice for us all.

Apparently it's terribly important to select Christmas gifts carefully if you are in a relationship, especially a new one. Should your gift be vastly different in quality and price to the one you receive, the relationship may be doomed. Even worse, one of you might buy a gift for the other but not vice versa. The wrong gift or no gift at all could spell instant disaster for the relationship.

Do I live on the same planet as these people?

Surely if the wrong gift kills a relationship, then that relationship was not meant to be. Sure, the wrong gift might be the straw that broke the camel's back but it must be symptomatic of larger problems. It must be a pretty fragile or shallow relationship that is killed solely by the wrong Christmas gift.

If your relationship can't survive the wrong Christmas gift, how are you going to cope together through the rest of life's trial and tribulations? It's not for nothing that the traditional marriage vows talk about "for worse", "for poorer", and "in sickness".

Maybe they need to update the wedding vows. "Will you love him, honour him and keep him even if he buys your Christmas gift from the Crazy Clark discount bin?"

Alternatively, maybe I should stop reading the Courier-Mail and its quality journalism.