Gift giving: it's complicated
Naughty or nice, it's never that easy
This is a reprint of Rollie Atkinson’s Christmas essay from 2023. I didn’t see it last year, but it came across my desk this year and I loved it. Rollie is the former publisher of Sonoma West Times and News. He purchased the original Sebastopol Times in 1995, renamed it Sonoma West, and kept local news alive in West County for more than 30 years. We view our Sebastopol Times news site as an inheritor of his work. Rollie now writes a column, “Moral Dilemmas: First Drafts & Commentaries,” on Substack.
T’is the season of gift giving. No pressure, right? We’ve all been through this before, and now we have lots of extra help other than just Santa Claus and all those mail order catalogs we thought we’d never look at. Now we have Amazon and all those “influencers” on social media and the internet. This is not going to be like the Christmases of our youth when we sat on Santa’s knee at the Sears & Roebucks store with our cut-out Christmas wishes from the store catalog. For this Christmas, we’ll need a solid WiFi connection.
This year we can tackle our Christmas lists almost without getting off the couch. But, just for old-time’s sake, we’ll plan at least one trip to the local mall so we can get the full experience of modern gift giving in our post-COVID world.
We know how bad the traffic will be and the parking will be even worse. We’ll get lost in some big store like Target that we only visit once or twice a year. We’ll be staggered by the behaviors of our fellow gift shoppers who will look more anxious than even we do and seem to be clueless about the “true spirit” of the season they are missing.
We’ll probably come home without any gifts. But at least we’ll feel less guilty to do all our gift giving with the new Amazon Prime account we’re sure we’ll be convinced to purchase today so we can get free delivery and a merrier Christmas all around.
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Commercialized
How did we come to put so much pressure on ourselves about all this Christmas and holiday gift giving? Is this all because we’re trying to follow the spirit of the Magis’ gift giving with baby Jesus? How did we go from exchanging small tokens of candy and fruit with family and children to big Macy parades, football bowls and TV specials with Snoopy and Dolly Parton and disco-dancing Santa Claus commercials?
How did we allow the “true spirit” of Christmas and holiday gift giving to become some elusive? Did all of this start happening when we put up our first artificial aluminum Christmas tree? No, that couldn’t be true, because Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge had the same problems. Maybe this custom of giving gifts has always been a special challenge for most of us.
“T’is better to give than receive.”
It turns out that gift giving has been part of human civilization all the way back to cave-dwelling days. Gifts or tokens were exchanged within a tribe to signify a social structure where elders or leaders received gifts and, in turn, handed out physical symbols of gratitude and loyalty. Gifts were also exchanged between neighboring tribes to build peaceful relationships. These gifts were usually shells, bones, animal teeth or feathers.
Later civilizations gave gifts to their gods. Ancient Greeks celebrated birthday parties with candles on cakes and exchanged gifts. In Medieval times, the gifts became more elaborate and obligatory. Kings and other rulers expected timely gifts from their followers as a sign of loyalty. In exchange, the rulers would spread gifts of food or even land to their most devoted supporters.
As civilizations advanced, the customs of gift-giving became more specialized. In almost all cultures, small children were awarded gifts of food or comfort, often during a year-end celebration close to the winter solstice.
Gifts became a special language of love and affection between men and women with the exchange of flowers, heart-shaped carvings and poems and songs.
Outside of Christmas and our other commercialized holidays, modern gift giving occasions can include expressions of friendship, gratitude, charity, solidarity, sharing of wealth or a token of sympathy. But modern gifts are also exchanged by us as souvenirs, apologies or attempted bribes.
When is a gift a gift and not an item of sale or some other form of contract or social custom? Well, that’s another sticky question. Giving a gift, even when it is unexpected or of just a small value always comes with a string attached.
French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) said there are three parts to gifting. These are giving, receiving and reciprocity. His studies concluded there are very specific customs and behaviors that should be followed to give and receive gifts properly. (In some cultures all gifts should be received with two open hands.)
As we all know very well, giving and receiving gifts is very tricky. Children love gifts and can never get enough of them but they have to be taught over and over to be sure to say “thank you.” Most adults probably would just as soon forego gift exchanges because of the potential social foibles that always come attached.
Gifts are stressful
Most people say receiving gifts is even more stressful than giving them. At Christmas and other times, what should you say to someone when you unwrap a gift that is unwanted or useless? You might say, “Oh, thank you, but I hope you have the receipt because this is not my size,” even though what you really mean is you dislike the gift and can’t wait to safely re-gift it to someone else.
We all say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have” and really mean it. But etiquette experts say we should actually never use that phrase. Some people play a sort of status game when they give gifts. They want to show off their wealth or social status. Isn’t it great to get a gift from someone that includes a likeness of themselves? And we all probably know a person or two who is totally “tone deaf” when it comes to giving appropriate gifts, right?
Sometime in late Medieval times, people started wrapping gifts in decorative paper and ribbons. In various cultures like the Chinese, Japanese and others the color of the wrapping symbolizes specific wishes or hints of the gift inside.
In other times, gifts were wrapped to hide the full intent of the gift. Sometimes the wrapped gifts were desirable and sometimes they were meant as punishment. Even today, Santa Claus still keeps his “naughty or nice” lists. And, even gifts from Santa are never just gifts, it seems.
Genuine, unique and sincere
Perhaps the greatest gift giver ever was the Turkish bishop Nicholas of Bari, later christened as Saint Nicholas. He was known for leaving secret gifts of gold coins for poor young girls whose fathers couldn’t afford a dowry. St. Nicholas Day was celebrated on Dec. 6 as a gift-giving celebration until the mid-1800s when the holiday became conflated with the more Western holiday of Christmas.
All the gift giving we do around Christmas time can be traced to the traditions of St. Nicholas. In fact, Santa Claus — the jolly fellow that likes Coca Cola — is named after him. In 19th century Dutch there was a fur-dressed figure with a headdress of holly named SinterKlaas, but that all changed about 200 years ago when the march to commercialize Christmas took off.
Now here we sit, clutched by our final gift-shopping anxieties as Christmas 2023 is just days away. There are only two more days remaining for guaranteed Dec. 25 delivery from USPS Express (expensive) mail, Amazon or FedEx. After that, what can we do?
Market and consumer surveys say each person will spend an average of $975 on gifts for others this year. From a similar total last year, it was recorded that $15 billion in gifts went unused and almost 5% of them went straight to the landfill.
But of all the big stresses around Christmas gift giving, the most treacherous remains the one where a husband and wife agree not to give each other any presents this year. All we can say is, go ahead and try it.
Merry Christmas.
See Rollie Atkinson’s Substack, Moral Dilemmas: First Drafts & Commentaries.
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