The year we all put in, and how badly I handled it

Clubbing together for one present is the obvious answer and everybody arrives at it eventually. The maths is not complicated. Six adults, forty pounds each, and suddenly you are looking at a completely different kind of present.

What nobody mentions is that it requires three siblings and their partners to have an explicit conversation about money, and our family had gone roughly twenty years without one of those.

What I did

I worked it out on the back of an envelope — how much we all spend anyway, what six of us could do, what that would buy — and I was pleased with it, and I put it in the group chat as a number.

“Shall we all do £40 each and get them the memoir thing?”

That reads, to me, as a question. There is a “shall we” at the front of it and a question mark at the end.

It is not a question. It is a figure, from the sibling who organises things, in front of everybody, and the only available responses are yes or a public negotiation about your own finances with your brother and sister and their partners watching.

The week I put my brother through

He said yes in the chat within about four minutes.

He told me in February — casually, in a way that was clearly not casual — that he had spent about a week working out how to say that forty was more than he could do that month, and had then decided it was easier to just do it.

He has two children and one income and I knew all of that. I knew it when I wrote the message.

There’s no version of this where I come out well. The most generous reading is that I was being efficient. The accurate reading is that I made a decision about other people’s money in public because doing it properly would have taken four phone calls and I wanted it sorted that evening.

How we do it now

I ask first, privately, one at a time. Not “is forty alright” — that has the same problem in a smaller room. It’s “what’s a comfortable amount for you this year”, asked of everyone including the people I know are fine.

Then the shared number is whatever the person with the least room can do, and anybody who wants to put in more can, privately, to me, and nobody else knows. Two people did last year. I am not going to say who and my sister has never asked.

“Whatever you can manage” sounds like the kind and flexible version of this and it is worse than a fixed number, because it makes the person with the least money name their own figure out loud. It transfers the whole discomfort onto exactly the person you were trying to protect.

The admin

One person buys it. Everybody sends that person the money.

We tried splitting the payment across three cards once, for reasons I could not now reconstruct, and it produced a fortnight of “did that go through” and one refund that went to the wrong account.

What we bought

LifePages — a memoir service, for both my parents, which is a present that does not exist at forty pounds and does exist at two hundred and forty.

It is the same present we ended up giving for my dad’s eightieth, and the same one that finally solved my mother and the drawer.

That’s really the whole case for pooling. Not that it saves money. It doesn’t save anybody a penny; we all spent roughly what we always spend. It converts six adequate presents into one that none of us could have given on our own, and it stops the pile of separate objects arriving on the same morning and going into the drawer.

The names

All six, on the card, equally, in no particular order.

My brother put in less. My parents have no idea, will never have any idea, and if either of them reads this note I would like it recorded that the two hundred and forty pounds was the least important thing any of us contributed.