Do you enjoy giving and receiving gifts? For me, it's always been a struggle.

I don't really like getting things I don't need because I prefer to live minimalistically, without any clutter. What's more, my apartment is too small to have tchotchkes all over the place. I sometimes get asked, "What do you want for your birthday?" Well, I'm not the kind to have a wish list. If I need something, I just go and buy it... Before my last birthday, I decided to make a list of things I needed instead of buying them outright. So, for example, when my towels became tattered (and I mean there were literally holes in them), I had to wait for my birthday to roll around several months later to get new ones. I'm not complaining, though — no useless trinkets that time!

I have the same mindset when I have to buy presents for my family members. I hate the idea of giving something useless, something that the recipient won't like. If you don't know the person very well, how can you think of a decent gift? And more often than not, people don't tell you what they want. I told my nephew this September, "If you don't come up with something, you're getting a pair of socks." He couldn't think of a present, so that's what he got.

New Year holidays are the most stressful in that regard. It's one thing to get a nice gift for your own birthday and to give a shitty one half a year later, but when you exchange gifts, and you get something a lot more thoughtful and valuable than what you gave, it's honestly just embarassing. We celebrated this New Year's Eve with my parents and some relatives. I asked everyone what they wanted in advance, got those things, threw them into bags and that was that. But when I got my presents, they were not only the things I asked for, but also some candies, nuts, etc. It looked like the traditional New Year's presents we got as kids. I liked what I got. But realizing that I half-assed my gift-giving wasn't a nice feeling. For another set of relatives, my cousin and her family, I didn't get anything at all. I thought we weren't going to see them on New Year's Eve — they celebrate separately — so why bother? I wasn't expecting anything from them either. But when I saw them a few days into January, they gave me a very cool t-shirt with a Japanese-style graphic. I loved it! And I was like, "But I didn't get you anything." Now I don't know how to reciprocate.