The red salt pig arrived a few days ago. I’d ordered it for my husband for Christmas, but he opened the Amazon box and saw it, miraculously unbroken, chucked in there with some nuts and bolts and wood polish. My order had gotten jumbled up with his.

“What the heck is this?” He held up the Émile Henry piece of pottery which, empty, looked like a five-inch replica of a ship’s smokestack, not like the elegant salt holder that stands proud alongside every French stove, the one I’d been meaning to buy for 10 or maybe 15 years.

“It’s called a salt pig.  It’s supposed to keep salt from clumping,” I said. “Apparently ‘pig’ means ‘earthenware vessel’ in ancient Scottish.”

“Looks like a ceramic PVC pipe elbow.” He shrugged and took his new nuts and bolts to the garage.

No point in wrapping and putting it under the tree now. I filled the glossy pig with the fancy French salt I’d bought five or maybe 10 years ago and placed it next to the stove. It looks nice but, even laden with salt, feels depressingly devoid of any meaning.

Back B.A. (Before Amazon), if I’d had a hankering for a red salt pig, I would have bought one at a store, if I could have found one, after first inspecting it and all the other salt pigs for any nicks or cracks. Or perhaps I would have chanced upon one in France and brought it home, nestling it snug in my suitcase. I would have wrapped it with just the right paper and tied it with a matching red bow. I might even have composed a little riddle for the tag, since my husband certainly wouldn’t be expecting a red salt pig under the tree, and it would be fun to watch him guess. He wouldn’t have mentioned it resembling a PVC pipe elbow and would have known I had really bought the pig for myself, since while he is excellent with the backyard grill, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him stand at the kitchen stove.

We would have admired said pig all Christmas Day and by the time we actually placed it on the counter, it would have acquired a personality and possibly a name and been part of the family, and we would forever look at it and remember the ceremony.

Now I felt as hollow as my red pig before I’d poured in the salt.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” Hamlet says, and he is right. Without the special significance we attribute to something, a red salt pig is . . . a red salt pig. Meanings are up to us, and there seems to be a pervasive, soul-crushing sense in America these days that nothing means anything anymore.

People have complained about the steady commercialization of Christmas for generations and Amazon, for all its astonishing convenience and efficiency, has been its death knell.

Everything is instant now. You don’t have to bother going out to the movies because they stream right into your house; you don’t even have to wait a whole week for the next episode of your TV show. You never get to anticipate because it’s already all right there. Talk about taking the fun out of Christmas, because where is the magic without anticipation?

I remember one rainy Christmas Eve in college when I’d taken up jogging and, before I set out, noticing my mother’s hesitant expression. I returned soaking wet in my cotton sweatshirt and my mother continued to look woeful until the next day when I unwrapped a purple nylon, weather-proof tracksuit (it was the 1970s). I lived in that tracksuit for 15 or maybe 20 years, until one of my children said it was embarrassing. My mother confessed she had nearly given it to me before my run but no, she knew it would mean more if I waited until Christmas Day.

I remember in 10th grade my father, who was a computer consultant before that was a thing, working late the whole month of December for a new client, a musical instrument business. The school-issued oboe I played in the concert band was made of plastic and while I quietly coveted my teacher’s wooden oboe, I never imagined having my own. That Christmas, after all the gifts were opened, my father presented a last one to me, and I burst into tears when I opened the beautiful wooden oboe he had traded extra hours to get.

That meant something.

My favorite all-time gifts, of course, are the ones our kids used to make and give to us with glee on Christmas morning, like footstools and paintings and tiny ceramic bowls — all of which tell a story and are on permanent display near the meaningless salt pig.

I remember one December when our two daughters, one blonde and one brunette, were in nursery school, and me driving all over the place searching for two old-fashioned baby dolls, the kind with real hair and eyes that closed. At a toy store a few towns away I found a classic blonde doll, but the brunette was sold out. The man who owned the toy store assured me he could get a brunette by Christmas so I stopped searching, kept calling, and lost sleep worrying she wouldn’t arrive in time. On that snowy Christmas Eve, the man stood on our front porch as promised and placed the doll in my arms. I will never forget the beatific looks on our daughters’ faces that Christmas morning, or telling my husband later that this would be the Christmas we would always miss.

Our children are grown up now and they can buy whatever they want on Amazon, or at least find it somewhere on the Internet. Everything is just a transaction: we may as well hand them some cash and spend our time helping the less fortunate, which is what I’d rather do anyway.

Maybe it’s time to reclaim Christmas.

This morning, a little rueful about the salt pig non-event, my husband decided to assign everyone a Secret Santa, emailing that the one rule was you had to make your gift.

When our son came over this evening to pick up his daughter Lucy, who is turning four and had spent the day trimming the tree, decorating, and baking with us, he glanced skeptically at the red pig and announced that it would take a lot more than a Christmas miracle for him to make anyone a gift and he didn’t exactly appreciate this sudden, last-minute decree.

“Okay,” my husband and I said together. “Next year.”

Lucy crawled into my lap, her hands sticky with flour and dough from the Christmas cookies. “Don’t worry, Winky.” (She’d begun calling me that when she was a baby, between endless renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”)

Had I forgotten that Christmas joy is about the children at your knee?

“I made you something very special, Winky, and I know you are going to love it!”

I can hardly wait.

Holly Hodder Eger is a seasonal resident of West Tisbury and the author of Split Rock: A Martha’s Vineyard Novel.