The Obligatory Gift

This Christmas season has seen an addition added to my life. Not one in the form of physical manifestations, but one more of intellectual acquirement. I would normally say of a thing such as this as, “adding another wrinkle to the old gray matter.” So what is this new fangled thing? A phrase, and one that I truly have yet to grasp the full content of, because the words that create this phrase stand in such diametric opposition to each other as to nullify the result. At least in my head. The phrase is “obligatory gift”. To give you the full meaning of this phrase, I place it into the context of the sentence it was first introduced to me with: “They got me a gift, now I have to go out and get an obligatory gift in return.” Feel free to tilt your head to the side and look at the screen with a stupid expression on your face, I’m sure it would mirror the one that I gave to this person after stating the sentence above.

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