Boston ? Once upon a time, when I was in another marriage with another mother-in-law, I got a Christmas gift of china. I was not — am not — a china kind of gal. It was what my mother-in-law wanted me to want.

So I oohed and ahhed and thanked her and began a tradition. Every Christmas, every birthday, I got another plate. It became harder and harder, and finally impossible, to tell her the truth.

Today, long after her death, decades after the marriage ended, I still have a dozen china plates in a zipped satin bag sitting in the basement. It is an homage to either my silence or her sensitivity, or to the imperfect melding of giving and receiving.

I think of this Royal Worcester disaster every year after Christmas, when all the ribbons are recycled and the paper trashed and the presents triaged into hits and misses. When all the thanks have been offered in all the living rooms, the small, awkward calculations begin.

Which “misses” can be returned without hurt feelings? Which will be brought out for visitation rights? Which will do time in the bottom drawer or back of the linen closet? Which will be sentenced to the garage, the graveyard of presents past and yard sales future?

I have a friend who calls it Christmas bulimia, an unsavory image, but I know what she means. The shopping binge is followed by a shopping purge. The pre-Christmas line at the checkout counter is replaced by the post-Christmas line at the return counter.

While she is standing in one line returning a present given to her, someone is in another line, returning a present she gave. Of this, she is sure.

Of course, this is the same pragmatic soul who once described the O. Henry Christmas story in decidedly post-modern terms. Wasn’t this a romantic tale of a young husband who sells his watch to buy a tortoise shell comb for his wife while she sells her hair to buy a platinum chain for his watch? My friend described this tale as another failure. They both, she says, came up a cropper in the gift department.

In her own ending, she imagines the young husband trying to return the combs. And the young wife trying to exchange the chain.

I do not rewrite O. Henry, nor do I subscribe to the eating disorder theory of gift-giving. But I do think post-present season is complex. It’s not about the contents of the boxes but about the relationships.

We all carry stories into the holidays. The fantasy of the perfect gift that unwraps to reveal a seamless match between giver and receiver. Just what I wanted.

Somewhere in childhood, we learned not to disappoint our elders with our own disappointment. We learned to be grateful for things we wanted and to feel some smarmy ingratitude for the things we didn’t.

This grew into the polite excuses — I love it but it’s the wrong size — and the little white lies — why, yes, we make ice cream all the time. It keeps us company in adulthood, through the itchy sweater and the china in the basement.

It’s not that every present is a misfit or that every gift comes fully loaded with expectations and unwrapped with disappointment. But I suspect that everyone has struggled with how and whether to balance honesty and kindness.

I know some folks who try to dodge the minefield. This year, it seems nearly half the gifts given were certificates. More than one family e-mailed lists of exactly what each member wanted, down to the style number. In many offices, the Secret Santa was given an assignment.

They think of it as an insurance plan, a guarantee for a mistake-proof Christmas. But even a “sure thing” can be a mismatch transforming a gift into a transaction — rather like an impersonal electronic transfer from one person’s account to another.

The fable of the perfect gift is at heart the fable of the perfect relationship. When the national swapfest is over, we still have the delicate daily dance of connections and misconnections. We live the rest of the year with the desire to give “just what I wanted” and to want just what another person has to give. As a seamless match.

But we also live with the day-by-day reality of emotional hits and misses, perfect fits and misfits between parents and children, husbands and wives, as obvious as the size 7 shoes gift-wrapped for the size 9. If we are lucky, we eventually learn how to say what we what and how to say thank you.

Sometimes, after decades, we may even find a storehouse of guilt and china in the basement and finally let it go.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.