Gift Giving Season, or: An Autistic Woman Attempts Advanced Social Origami

Gift giving season arrives every year with the subtlety of a marching band crashing through my nervous system. For many people, it’s festive. For me—a middle-aged autistic woman—it’s a complex social escape room with no instructions and unclear rules.

Let’s start with the moment of opening a gift. This is not a passive activity. This is performance art.

My brain immediately splits into tabs:

Do I like this?

Do I look like I like this the correct amount?

Is this a “smile + gasp” gift or a “soft appreciation nod” gift?

Am I smiling too long?

Is my face frozen?

Oh no, my face is frozen.

If I genuinely love the gift, great—I just have to dial my joy down to a socially acceptable simmer. If I don’t love it, however, I am in danger. Because my face is not trained in diplomacy. My face believes in honesty, clarity, and occasionally panic.

Social politeness is not my strong suit. I don’t lie well. I don’t mask delight well. I am one poorly timed eyebrow twitch away from committing a holiday faux pas that will be discussed until Easter.

And that’s just the opening.

Before we even get there, we have the logistics.
Who do I give gifts to? When does someone graduate from “card-only” to “actual present”? If someone gave me something last year, am I now in a lifelong blood pact of reciprocity? How much should the gift be worth? Is this a $20 relationship or a $50 relationship? What if I misjudge and accidentally declare emotional bankruptcy or, worse, emotional overinvestment?

It’s too much.

There are invisible rules stacked on top of invisible rules, and everyone else seems to have received a handbook I missed. Meanwhile, my brain is in the corner trying to calculate the social exchange rate while whispering, “We could also just simply vanish.”

Which, honestly, I kind of did.

After isolating myself quite a bit over the past few years, something unexpected happened. With fewer social performances required, I noticed a quiet shift in how affection wanted to come out of me. Words still didn’t show up reliably. Big gestures still felt unnatural. But something else emerged.

I became a penguin.

If you don’t know: some penguins express affection by giving each other pebbles. No speeches. No expectations. Just, “I saw this and thought of you.”

And that’s when I realized—I don’t hate gift giving. I hate transactional gift giving.

So I started making things. Little handmade objects. No calendar obligation. No reciprocity ledger. No “now you owe me forever.” Just something created with care and offered freely, like a pebble slid across the ice.

Here. This made me think of you. That’s it.

No expectation of anything in return. No reaction monitoring. No internal stopwatch on gratitude. Just a quiet expression of affection in a language that actually feels like mine.

Ironically, this has been the best gift-giving experience of my life. Better than receiving anything. Because for once, I’m not performing. I’m communicating.

So during this gift giving season, while the rest of the world is tallying budgets and decoding etiquette, I’ll be over here—an autistic middle-aged woman, gently handing out penguin pebbles in handmade form.

No rules. No pressure. Just love, translated into something solid enough to hold.