I love giving presents. I love getting presents. Actually, I like everything about birthdays, from the attention to the cake, even if it isn’t my birthday! Birthdays have been a lot more fun since we had kids, because their enthusiasm for what they consider one of the best days of the year is hard to resist!
As for the presents themselves, I am easy to please and only feel uncomfortable if I think someone went overboard with the gift. My mom is often guilty of that, and doesn’t even try to hide the fact that her motivation is to give the best birthday (or Christmas) present in the family. For birthdays and Christmas, she will ask me several times what everyone else is giving the kids, then be sure to outdo them. I now tell her I don’t know what others are doing. I have to be careful not to mention anything I’d like to have for myself in the few months leading up to Christmas or my birthday unless I want her to buy it for me. Once I briefly mentioned wanting a KitchenAid mixer, and she got it for me for Christmas. I love it, but I wish she hadn’t spent that much AND I wish she hadn’t asked me three times if it was my favorite gift. She did the same thing with an iPod a few years later.