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Christmas is coming, ”laments Ellen Stuart,“ and I have to think of a gift for everyone. . . Honey, it’s boring!
Her aunt felt sorry for her and remembers her childhood, before it was too late to give a gift. “Gifts did not fly in those days as they do today.”
These popular concepts are older than we can imagine. Ellen is a character in Christmas; or, The Good Fairy, a short story written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1850.
Mu The Christmas war (1988), historian Stephen Nissenbaum states that Beecher Stowe, born in 1811, was right in his childhood memories. The practice of Christmas gift giving originated in the US in the 1820s. By the 1830s, the pages of the newspaper contained commercial complaints, and Macy’s in New York was open until midnight on Christmas Eve in early 1867.
Christmas gift-giving became even more popular as Christmas was celebrated. Prior to this, there was a commotion in the community, such as Halloween. Of course, at Christmastime fraudsters were not children in elaborate costumes but groups of drunken boys who wanted alcohol, canned cheese and money. Not surprisingly, Clement Clarke Moore, writing in the early 1820s, was eager to redesign Christmas Eve as a time of peace when “in every house, no creature was in chaos”.
After two centuries of Christmas commercialism, it seems pointless to deny it. But we can be willing to be generous in giving. Psychologists have been studying the problem in recent years.
Francis Flynn and Francesca Gino found that choosing a gift from a wish list might seem like a daunting task, but the recipient may view such gifts as fantasy. The provider who asks for the checklist is the provider who takes the trouble to choose what you want afterwards.
Jessica Rixom, Erick Mas and Brett Rixom found, surprisingly, that a carefree wrapped gift from a friend could be more appreciated than anything else on Instagram. As a result, it seems that scruffiness lowers expectations. If the gift seems to be about to get wrapped around, the contents are pretty amazing.
And in a study that would not surprise anyone, four (male) researchers advised men not to give expensive gifts to women when they first started dating; it seems that women do not always appreciate men’s efforts to make them feel responsible.
Koma research what struck me the most this year comes with the help of Jeff Galak, Elanor Williams and the proper name Julian Givi. Givi and his colleagues argue that there is one, simple disagreement that leads to many of our mistakes. Gift recipients often focus on when the gift is opened, when to the recipient the gift is simply the beginning of the story.
This inconsistency describes the many things that go wrong when gifts are opened. The most obvious type of bad gift is “unusual” – a golf tshotchke for someone who is known to love golf, either, or a T-shirt with the worst logo to wear in public. Both gifts are sizzle and no steak. They make people laugh or shout, but then they just ask if the trash in the area will be opened before the New Year.
But there are also hidden flaws. For example, a lot of people enjoy events like a night at a concert, but a concert ticket is probably a paper with a QR code, and there is nothing fun at the opening. So gift givers tend to focus on material possessions instead.
Another bias is to love the whole gift instead of other things. Suppose the recipient wants a food processor and the gift giver cannot afford to buy the best one. Most gift givers prefer to provide a low-cost model that fits the budget, while most gift recipients would prefer to have a high-quality donation of high-quality equipment.
Gift givers seldom think about how to use it – for example, when will the recipient have the opportunity to use it? Even a gift card may be helpful or unhelpful, depending on the circumstances. (I know people who have received gift cards that are legal in stores within a few hours.)
In 2007 economist Jennifer Pate Offenburg learned about the cost of reselling gift cards on eBay. Cards from Home Depot, OfficeMax and Starbucks did well. Products from Tiffany & Co and Victoria’s Secret are sold at very low prices. Tiffanys may look very special, but the Starbucks card is the one most accessible to the public.
Above all, surprises abound. Sometimes when a wonderful gift is carefully chosen, a surprise becomes a temporary joy that benefits the giver just as much as the recipient. When the surprise of the offering is a flop, the recipient has it. Beecher Stowe’s Christmas story ends with someone saying, “There are countries where money is wasted, at this time of year, because things that no one wants, and no one cares when they get it.”
It has been like that for 200 years. But thanks to human science, we can do better. Focus on what the recipient will do with the gift, rather than simply wanting it to work during your release. Love, surprise and happiness are good, but do not be ashamed to be helpful. And if you do not know what gift you would like to give, ask.
Tim Harford’s new book is “How to Make a Worldwide”
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