AA Gifts & Baskets Idea & Advice Blog

Operating your business goes beyond a firm handshake and following up on phone calls. You need to build a business relationship and build trust. At some point you will need to purchase a gift. This, in itself, is a challenge. What exactly is an appropriate gift? What are the rules of corporate gift giving? What kind of message do you want to convey? Corporate gift giving is serious business. It needs to be done properly, politely and be politically correct.

Proper gift giving can strengthen your relationship, build trust, increase loyalty and stimulate referrals. You can enhance your image with an impressive gift and set yourself apart from the crowd.

When gift giving is done incorrectly, it can deteriorate the rapport you once had, enrage an already upset client, jeopardize any future business or referrals and worse, create a lack of respect among your colleagues.

Gift giving etiquette should be understood or serious consequences will result. These etiquette guidelines will ensure you become a successful corporate gift giver.

• Do not give a gift that touches your skin: Perfume, jewelry, clothing. The message may be conveyed as inappropriate and unintended.
• Gifts from males to females should not be personal at all…Again, nothing should touch the skin.
• Gifts from females to males should avoid any unintended messages. A bouquet of mixed flowers is acceptable, however, roses are not.
• Giving alcohol or wine sends an inappropriate message.
• Do not give your boss a gift of any kind. This may only be done as a group. Gifts from individuals may be seen as soliciting for a raise.
• Gifts only for fellow employees or colleagues that are at your level are acceptable. Gifts for upper management should be presented as a group.
• A company logo should be subtle and not seem like blatant advertising.
• Gifts should reflect the occasion it is intended for, (no logo mugs in a Birthday gift).
• When giving gifts to a department, give the same gift to each individual or a large gift for the entire office to share.
• The gift should have the recipient’s personality in mind, not yours.
• If possible, hand write a card instead of a “computerized” version. This conveys sincerity.

With all the challenges facing us on a daily basis, we can’t afford to destroy a business relationship due to lack of basic gift giving etiquette. These simple guidelines will build your business relationships and strengthen your employee loyalty.

You went looking for yourself. Anyone could find a place, a job, a conversation, but you wanted to find out who you were and just as importantly, you needed to find out who you weren’t.

You had met when you were both very young; young enough for it all to seem only mysterious and to have no brutality to it.

You were thirteen, and then, when he turned sixteen, he left to go back home.

Come and visit me, he said. You said you would.

The time finally came and it was, as such things always are, an adventure. The airports were, massive, full of every language, every idea of every place in the world.

The Orthodox man at De Gaulle asked you to pray, but you declined. You were getting closer and the faces began to change and the atmosphere changed with it. The security guards did not smile and they held automatic rifles and small machine guns in their hands and their eyes never seemed to stop scanning the airport terminal, or your face.

As the plane banked over the electric blue of the Mediterranean, the sun was starting to decline, and you looked out the small window and saw the lights of Tel Aviv coming on in sharp glittering rows. The plane leveled out and the pilot came on the intercom to say you were making your final approach. The plane came down and you felt the impact of arrival and people on the plane applauded. They were home.

You had both grown older, if not, up; completely, and there, with the street signs and the voices on the radio, the weight of the heat of a late summer, everything made you feel that you had stepped across a threshold and that a door had closed behind you.

That, he said, pointing towards a small long valley with buildings high up on either side; that’s The Valley of the Cross. You looked at the squat brown monastery in the middle of the valley and beyond it to the rows of apartments and houses. It was like that everywhere you turned; the impossibly old, and the impossibly new.

You went up the tallest mountain in the city. Carved into the side were, first, the Roman ruins, then the Crusaders, then the trenches the British had dug all of them like a kind of clock recording centuries instead of hours. At the top, was a mosque and a Coke a Cola stand.

First the grub, he said, laughing, then the good books.

Downstairs, in the crypt below the mosque, there were Orthodox men standing around the tomb, they said, of the Prophet Samuel. They spoke to us with thick New York accents, like characters in a gangster movie from the always receding past.

You climbed to the top of the minaret. The valleys and the Old City and the far mountains rolled out under the haze and waving heat lines rose from the ground like strips of seaweed in a vast ocean.

What do you think? He asked.

You looked around, and history looked back, then it yawned at you and you had to laugh.

You could either find yourself, you said, or get lost in a hurry.

Well, he said, you’ve got a good guide, so you’ll be fine.

He was right.

He had been an actor, and an activist, a bus driver, and an ice cream delivery man. When we knew him, he was living alone, and he was dying of cancer. His stories were always fantastic but sooner or later they checked out because it was a small neighborhood and

San Francisco is really a small city and everyone know everyone or at least they know the person who knows the person who knows. His name was Jake and when he was seventeen, he had answered an ad in the newspaper and was hired to perform with a local theatre group. He needed a place to stay and someone gave him an address and there, right off of

Haight Street

, he found a big old Victorian house with the then, average rent of only seventy-five dollars a month.If you couldn’t raise seventy-five a month, he said, you weren’t trying. He got a room on the top floor and his first night there he met one of his roommates who was sitting in the empty living room, listening to classical music. They became friends, Jake and the girl and later more than friends and one day, she asked if he would mind that her kid brother came up from

Los Angeles and crashed on their couch. I didn’t mind at all, he said, and that’s how we met.

Jackson was just a scrawny kid who said he wanted to be a musician, and of course, back then, there, every kid you met said the same thing. They were all going to be musicians, but in his case, he could actually sing. He stopped and put on a record - yes, a record. The needle hissed on the disk, and there was the old familiar popping sounds and then the song started. The high soft voice was instantly recognizable and we listened. It’s about me, said Jake, rather forlornly, about us, and that summer in the house just before

Jackson split to go back south. My wife and I talked about it; about how we were not sure and then how we were certain it was all true. We checked the newspapers and sure enough, he was playing a concert near the city and we bought tickets and surprised him and he was so happy. He packed a small bag with a photo of the three of them together and when we got to the venue, we found a security guard and he asked, politely, if the guard would please pass on the note and the photo and the guard said yes. Mid-way through the show, the lights low and the spotlight on him, he sat down at a small electric keyboard and told a story about his old home; his brief time at a big old Victorian off of Haight that he shared with his sister and a friend. Then he sang the song - about what he called, the fountain of sorrow, the fountain of life. Jake cried, and so did we and the audience, who were just being entertained, clapped. He cried on and off all the way home that night and finally, at the door to his apartment, he thanked us. Walking home, my wife was quiet and then, she said: I don’t know what ripples will come from this, but you’ve done the right thing - giving a gift of time and connection is worth more than every penny we spent on those tickets. I knew she was right.

I met her in San Francisco. Her name was Elisabeth. She was a proper British woman with big glasses that made her blue eyes seem watery and large, as if you were looking at a well-dressed goldfish swimming in its comfortable home.

She served tea and small sandwiches with the crust sliced perfectly from the bread and she told me about her childhood in England while we sipped the tea and I ate the sandwiches.

She did not eat but talked all through that hot, weary September day, her perfect British accent purring softly through what seemed like every movie ever made about England and then her days at Oxford where she met, Harold - we called him Harry, she said.

She was nineteen and he was twenty-three. She was studying ancient Greek and he was a history major and he had commented on her ability to perform - that was the word he used - perform - the Times Crossword, in ink, in just a few minutes. He thought that was remarkable and he gave me several word puzzles and when I finished them all quickly, and correctly he asked if I wanted to meet a friend of his.

Of course, I said yes, she said, for I was delighted to be in his company and everything about him seemed so dashing and keen.

She said keen without a trace of self-consciousness, and I let my eyes drift over the things in her sitting room, as she called it; the commemorative plates embossed with images of the royal family, the Union Jack under glass beside the smaller tricolor of France.

She paused and stood, and followed my gaze to a photo. She went to it and picked it up with care and sighed a little and then she turned the photo, popped open the back and pulled out a neatly folded cloth.

She brought both the photo and the cloth to me and put them on the low table between us and said - yes, this was our little group. There, she said, pointing at a tall, thin man with red hair, that was Harry.

Harry, she said, recruited me to service with the SOE - Strategic Operations Executive.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but then she unfolded the cloth and showed me that it was a scarf and then, calmly, a faint gleam of mischief showing in her big blue eyes, she folded the scarf one way and then another and said: See my dear boy, it’s just a scarf, but folded correctly, it becomes a map of France.

I sat there, mutely, a cup of tea in one hand, a sandwich in the other, while this proper old British lady, erect and prim at somewhere near seventy, proceeded to tell me about parachuting into occupied France, her French lover, who betrayed her to the Germans, her incredible escape, and how that scarf had helped save her life.

I thanked her and thanked her for her time and the tea and sandwiches, and she walked me to the door and then she asked me to wait a moment.

She returned with a small square of violet colored tissue paper with a piece of red twine around it.

For you, she said, so someone remembers what we did.

I thanked her again and left her there and hurried home clutching the tissue tightly. I got home and opened the package carefully and inside was the scarf. It was colorful, still, so many years later and smelled faintly of vanilla and holding it up I looked at the pattern of the lines and saw roads, towns, and rivers but mostly, I saw a young girl, in love, and in danger, trying to do the right thing in impossible circumstances, and whenever I look at the scarf, I see her as she was then, and as she was when I knew her, and I know that she had given me a wondrous gift: the gift of remembering.

It was simple because it was only a pair of dice. She gave them to me the last night we saw each other. She smiled her full wattage smile, the one that powered and lit up most of the city. She held the dice in the palm of one small hand, her long fingers pointing straight out at me.

Go ahead, she said, roll them.

I held out one hand and she dropped the dice into my palm and watched as I dropped them on to the polished top of the bar.

The dice tumbled and rolled, clattered on the surface, bounced off of each other and rolled to a stop, showing a pair of sixes.

Nice, I said, but she shook her hand, and scooped up the dice and held them out to me a second time. She smiled again, this time, brighter than before and I tried to read the playfulness in her eyes but she was being enigmatic, like a sprite dancing in a magic forest, and I held my hand out, and as before, she dropped the dice into my palm. I looked at the dice. They were red with white grooves marking the numbers and I looked back at her but she only smiled and radiated the warmth I’d come to know over the past three months.

Go ahead, she said, roll them again.

I shook them in my closed hand without taking my eyes from hers and she did not look away until I shot the dice on to the bar top and we both watched them bounce and crash and they came to a stop, showing a again, a pair of sixes.

Well, I said, these are lucky, or maybe you’re lucky and it’s rubbed off on me.

She laughed and leaned over the bar, propping her lovely face in one hand, her long, chestnut brown hair, draped like a theater curtain down across her neck and her shoulders disappearing towards the middle of her back.

Do it again, she said, and then, turning suddenly, she darted away like a horse bolting, and I glanced as she went to talk to another customer.

For three months we’d known each other and had known from the beginning I was leaving. We played dice all the time - roll them and wait while the other person guesses the number - guess correctly, you get to ask a question; guess incorrectly, you have to answer a question.

She came back and I smiled and she watched as I rolled the dice and watched as once again they came to a stop, showing a pair of sixes.

Okay, I said, scooping the dice up in my hands, what’s the story?

She laughed, and flung her hair back, leaned over the bar, and came close to me.

Cheater’s dice, she said, loaded with a small weight. They’ll always bring you an answer. So, they’re yours, but only if you promise me something.

The smile went down low, and the whole bar seemed to dim, and I knew she was serious. Sure, I said, what?

Never use them to hurt anyone, and only use them the next time we see each other.

She reached out and cupped my hands in hers and squeezed and said: Promise.

I promised her that and I kept them and waited and knew, they were the most honest gift I’d ever received from anyone.