Clear and present danger Some people don’t just look a gift horse in the mouth, they perform dental surgery BY KRIS FRIESWICK

I have a bracelet that was given to me by a friend as a small but very thoughtful engagement gift. It’s too big. The wire that holds the beads in place is loose and sticks up at a funny angle. It gouges me nearly every time I wear it — which isn’t very often. One time it cut me so deeply, I bled for an hour. My husband suggested I return it. I explained my personal return policy: I don’t.

Unless it is broken, or does not fit at all — as in, the sleeves stop at my elbows (which almost never happens because most people who know me have noticed that I’m almost six feet tall) — I do not return gifts. I get too emotionally attached to them. I think each gift contains a little piece of the heart of the person who gave it to me. Some of those people have bad taste, some have wonderful taste — and together they make up the rich panoply that is my world. I don’t make a habit of bringing pieces of my friends and relatives back to the mall to trade them in for faceless, nameless, meaningless — albeit nicer — stuff. When Andrew and I got married, I didn’t even return the duplicate gifts.

That’s why I was slack-jawed with disbelief when my friend Emma told me that her favorite part of Christmas is returning all her gifts. She attributes this annual ritual to the phenomenally bad gift-giving habits of her family, most notably her husband. "You can’t do all your shopping at the Marshall’s clearance rack the night before Christmas and expect to make people happy," she says with a shrug.

At first I found her rampant gift-returning to be the height of thanklessness. But, after she listed some bad gifts from Christmases past, I cut her some slack. Emma and her husband have obviously arrived at a workable system. He gives her stuff that involves minimal thought, planning, and time, knowing she will return it all — which she does, thus completing the cycle. In their home, a gift isn’t really a gift, it’s essentially an oddly shaped Marshall’s gift certificate. And it’s all part of a carefully designed, time-tested marriage-preservation technique.

On the other end of the spectrum are people like Kathy. I recently gave Kathy’s daughter a birthday present — a set of plastic shapes that clicked together like building blocks. The kid loved it, but her mother, clearly, did not. Kathy explained that her daughter already had enough building toys, and her house was filled from one end to the other with pieces of pieces. She suggested that next year I touch base with her before I bought anything for her child — and then implied that I had been inconsiderate for failing to do so this year. The only thing that kept me from screaming, "You ungrateful bitch" were the squeals of a delighted child in the next room.

Somewhere between Kathy and Emma lies the new Zeitgeist, in which it’s not only acceptable to examine, rank, judge, malign, and return gifts, but it is expected. Every store will now give you a gift receipt with your purchase — even for a diamond (in case it’s not big enough, I suppose). Somewhere along the line, not looking a gift horse in the mouth morphed into major equine dental surgery. The point of gift-giving has shifted from the giving to the gift.

I don’t know if we’ve all gotten a lot more greedy and ungrateful in the last 10 years, or just more rude. But I trace the problem to the spreading of gift registries. You can now register at any store for any occasion. We’re getting used to getting exactly what we want, and we apparently have zero tolerance for those who color outside the lines. Back in the day, we were polite enough to keep our mouths shut when we received a gift we didn’t want or like. Those days are well and truly gone. Case in point, a snippet from an actual conversation I had with someone I’d love to name but won’t: "Maybe next Christmas you could get me something other than that cheap costume jewelry you got me last year." Someone call the Emily Post emergency hotline.

For some people, I suppose it’s the height of cool to act ungrateful and put out at the sight of yet another entirely unacceptable gift. I hope I’m never that cool. I know that everybody likes to get nice stuff. If you’re rude enough to point out that it’s not what you really wanted, then you didn’t deserve it in the first place. This year, when you’re ripping through that stack of oddly shaped gift certificates under the tree, try to remember this: every one comes with a little piece of somebody’s heart.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at k.frieswick@verizon.net