The case against Christmas presents

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/19/the-case-against-christmas-presents

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Every year, Gwyneth Paltrow helpfully provides the world with her personal guide to the best holiday gifts of the season. Her 2013 must-haves include artisanal slingshots, napkins printed with customised maps and brandy glasses that roll around the table.

Giving and receiving gifts like these, with little or no practical function, has become a more or less mandatory Christmas tradition. Come December, we are duty bound to spend money we often don’t have on things that nobody needs.

It was the very first Christmas that set the precedent for the next two millennia of useless gifts. The gold, frankincense and myrrh delivered to the infant Jesus were designed to be purely symbolic, not practical. There’s no record of what the Holy Family did with their presents, but some suggest they sold them immediately to pay for their journey to Egypt, which should assuage the guilt of those of us who spend January eBaying our holiday tat.

The main problem with Christmas gifts is that they just don’t make good economic sense. In his book Scroogenomics, Joel Waldfogel argues most of us are terrible at predicting what other people want. By paying too much for gifts that don’t satisfy the recipients, we generate a “deadweight loss” that amounts to billions of dollars of wealth wasted every year.

He’s not the only one who has questioned the practice of gift-giving. A British money-saving website has suggested we sign pre-nup style agreements with our family and friends to forgo presents. Going “gift-free” has been spruiked in the pages of the Oprah magazine and advocated by Mennonite Christians as a way to rediscover the reason for the season.

The idea hasn’t quite taken off, though. Yuletide refuseniks run the risk of appearing boorish or smug, rather like those who boast about being child free or not owning a television. It’s also difficult to opt out unless everyone else does too. As anthropologists have noted, gift exchange plays a central role in reinforcing kinship bonds. It also enhances our prestige: we demonstrate our literate sensibility by giving a novel from the Booker long-list, or flaunt our quirky side with hipster perfume that smells of nothing.

Yet there are cracks appearing in the edifice of Christmas gift-giving. Middle-class Westerners live in an age of abundance when practically anything can be acquired with a few mouse-clicks. Why give a book when your recipient can already find it on their Kindle? Why give a CD or DVD when they can download almost any file they want instantly? Soon, even the most obscure Christmas trinkets will able to be 3D printed or delivered within hours by Amazon’s drones, or Google’s robots.

Because we’ve become so accustomed to boundless consumer choice, many of us are embracing a new tradition that lets us get exactly what we want for Christmas: the gift card. A recent survey by the US retailers’ peak body found that gift cards have never been more popular, and are the most-requested present of the holiday season. Yet while store credit might seem to be more practical than traditional gifts, it still makes bad economic sense: over half of all recipients don’t get round to using the full value of their gift card before it expires.

What’s more, gift cards run the risk of destroying the very quality that makes a gift a gift. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, gift-giving involves a mutual suspension of disbelief. Giver and receiver know they are bound together in a ritual economic exchange that typically imposes the obligation of a counter-gift of equal value. But we agree to participate in a game of pretence that gifts are born from a noble spirit of generosity with no self-interest or expectation of return (even as we privately note how well others’ gifts stack up with our own). When Christmas presents are reduced to a naked transaction of dollar amounts – as in Facebook’s gift shop, which let us swap $25 discount codes via email – it’s hard to maintain the illusion we are participating in a transcendent act of kindness.

So what is the answer to the meaninglessness of Christmas gift-giving? One response has been to seek out handcrafted, one-of-a-kind objects to regain a sense of authenticity and personal feeling, either by making them oneself or paying others to do so. But glitter-dipped pinecones and crocheted coffee-cup cosies often seem to even more conspicuously pointless than store-bought tchotchkes.

A better option is making Christmas gifts actually do something useful. Oxfam Unwrapped cards, which let us exchange a symbolic token while making a difference to global poverty, are increasingly popular alternatives to traditional presents. The innovative non-profit GiveDirectly even allows us to transfer cold, hard cash (surely the best gift of all) to impoverished families in Kenya and Uganda via mobile phone payments.

The idea of pivoting outwards to the community is what the festive season was once all about, before its reinvention in the Victorian era as a private family ritual practised behind closed doors. Christmas in the middle ages was a time of feasting, dancing, public drunkenness – and giving practical help to the poor. Which sounds like a much better idea than swapping novelty ties and electronic salt and pepper shakers with distant relatives.

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