On gift giving
Giving good gifts is hard, and by and large I think people do a terrible job of it. There are people who genuinely love any and all gifts. I don’t pretend to understand them.
Instead I offer advice for giving gifts to people who make a sharp divide between good and bad gifts, and I argue that our societal norms around gift giving lead to worse outcomes than if we broke them and focused on giving good gifts instead.
Our gift norms are nonsense
We have strong cultural norms about gift giving that can be summarised as so:
- You must give gifts on festive occasions (Christmas, birthdays, Valentine’s day etc.), and when visiting someone for a party
- You must smile and thank someone for their gift regardless of whether you actually like it (and you certainly must not ‘look a gift horse in the mouth’!)
- Cash is not an acceptable gift (unless being given to a child)
To break any of these norms is considered very rude, but I argue that we should break them all and introduce a much more important norm which to me seems conspicuous by its absence: your gift must be good.
This may seem obvious, but we give and receive bad gifts all the time and there are no consequences. Giving a bad gift fulfils your obligations to give a gift, and the recipient has to smile and thank you regardless.
Probably you don’t think this applies to you. You don’t give bad gifts. But how would you know? The recipient thanks you whatever you give them. Yes, some of us are less adept than others at concealing our disappointment, but most of the time you will not be able to tell.
So we have a system where I must buy you a gift even though I do not know what you want, and you must say that you like it even if you hate it. This seems counter-productive on a number of fronts, not to mention horribly wasteful.
The good news is that we can do better.
Why do we give gifts?
According to English Heritage, gift giving is “an ancient tradition, likely to be as old as humanity itself”. We must start at first principles and ask why we give gifts in the first place.
French sociologist Marcel Mauss argues in The Gift, a 1925 essay on the form and reason of exchange in archaic societies, that gifts are all about social bonds. We give a gift in order to create a social bond; to accept the gift is to accept the bond and agree to reciprocate to further cement that bond in future.
These reasons explain our norms well. We must give gifts and we must accept them, to do otherwise would be to damage our social bonds. But while these reasons are valid, they feel a bit self-serving to our modern sensibilities, and instead we like to tell ourselves and others that we give gifts to show our love and appreciation by bringing the recipient joy.
It is surprisingly then that we have no norms around this. There is no norm that your gift must be a good gift that really does bring the recipient joy.
But perhaps we can at least fulfil our first aim regardless of the quality of the gift? After all, they say that it’s ‘the thought that counts’.
I would argue that though the thought does count, the quality of that thought counts too. If I know you have a fear of spiders and I buy you a taxidermied tarantula, I suspect you will have little time for my suggestion that it’s the thought that counts. Clearly I haven’t done much thinking. If I had then I would have remembered your aversion to arachnids and bought you something else instead.
Most people, I think, accept this argument without too much trouble. Very rarely does anyone buy a random gift; instead they make a different kind of error, they buy something related to your interests.
Beware of the expertise gap
At first pass, it may seem like I am being intentionally difficult now, but let me elaborate. In general, if you are interested in something then you know more than most people about the topic in question. You might be a fan of Agatha Christie novels, or beer, or aeroplanes, or a particular K-pop group. Everybody has something that they are interested in and some small expert on.
I, a well meaning acquaintance wanting to buy you a gift, think ‘Aha! I know that they like Agatha Christie, so I shall buy them this Agatha Christie themed knick-knack or perhaps this special edition’. To someone like me who is not a Christie aficionado this probably sounds perfectly reasonable, but that is because I have fallen into the expertise gap. I have significantly less expertise than you in this area and I am making a fool of myself without realising it. Were I an expert I would know that no self-respecting Poirotphile would be seen dead with that Miss Marple knick-knack, and that that particular special edition is considered very poorly edited and not worth the paper it’s printed on. Thus my gift to you might in other circumstances be considered something of an insult. This can be particularly the case for children when they have decided that the best dinosaur is the Apatosaurus and in your ignorance you have bought them a T-Rex.
Every subculture, community, and fandom holds very strong opinions about which the rest of the world is totally oblivious, and if you blunder in as an outsider then you run a very high risk of committing a greater faux pas than if you had simply picked a gift at random. (In my own case, I have foolishly made public my interest in space, and thus I have been condemned to receive cosmological crap until the day I die.)
If picking randomly is not permitted and putting a modicum of thought in is just as bad, then what then is one to do?
Better no gift than a bad gift
First you must accept that giving no gift is better than giving a bad gift. A bad gift is a sin on many levels. It is a waste of your money and of the world’s finite resources, it forces the recipient to perform emotional labour for you, lumps them with something that they do not want (which they must dispose of, or worse, keep and display in their home for fear of offending you), and sets up an expectation of reciprocity.
(The caveat here is that, as in all aspects of a relationship, clear communication is key. You must ensure that your recipient is also someone who subscribes to this argument. For some people it really is the thought that counts, and arguing that not giving them a gift actually involved more thought rarely goes down well. The author accepts no liability for any injury to pride or damage to relationships.)
An alternative to no gift that also avoids any risk of a bad gift is to give cash. In the world of humanitarian aid, interventions are increasingly compared to simply giving cash to those in need. Cash transfers are simple and efficient, and if a charity proposes something more complex, then they need to prove that it offers a greater cost-effectiveness.
We should apply the same principle to gift giving. If you can’t say with any certainty that your gift would be more appreciated by the recipient than an equivalent cash payment then you should just give them the money.
The drawback is that giving cash, especially to adults, is itself considered rude, because it implies no thought and makes value comparisons very clear to everyone involved. There are however ways to make this a bit more personal, like Donnachaidha Ó Chionnaigh’s ingenious take, and to make a financial contribution towards something you know the recipient is saving up for.
You might think a gift card is a happy medium between cash and a gift. Think again. Gift cards rob the recipient of the freedom that cash offers, and in many cases you are just giving money to a company. In 2012 the BBC estimated that £250m is wasted as unspent gift card balances each year. The only exception I will permit to this rule is book tokens for children.
Ignore deadlines
You should ignore the expectation to give gifts at Christmas, birthdays and other celebrations. Artificial deadlines encourage lower quality gifts, and if you subscribe to this schedule then the absence of a gift on one of these occasions will be all the more obvious.
Instead, whenever you find a good gift, give it immediately. Don’t deprive them of the joy of a good gift by sitting on it for nine months until your anniversary. Don’t worry if it’s a random Tuesday in March. Don’t describe it as a belated Christmas present or an early birthday present, just say that you saw this thing and thought of them, and give it to them right away. An unexpected gift is always better appreciated, really shows you put some thought in, and avoids any comparisons with any other gift givers.
Get to know the recipient
When you visit their house, observe their belongings carefully. What kind of art do they put on the walls? What kind of books do they read? Is their kitchen full of interesting ingredients? Are their hiking shoes always muddy by the door?
When you’re out and about with them do the same: What do their eyes linger over in the shop window? What do they compliment about a passer-by’s outfit? What do they mention in conversation?
If you know the recipient less well, then asking their partner or close friends is also a good approach. Beware of asking their family though. People choose their friends and usually share interests with them. Family members on the other hand are the luck of the draw, and they are notorious for giving terrible gifts.
Ask
A last resort is simply to ask. I am generally opposed to asking people what they want and also to telling people what I want, but I have no good reason for this other than that it feels like a bit of a cop out, so I advise you to be less stubborn.
There are a couple of ways you can do this. One is to ask outright: ‘I would like to buy you a gift, what would you like?’, but this can feel a little on the nose and result in more of a transaction than a gift. It doesn’t show much thought on your part, and you end up just buying them something they would have bought themselves anyway.
A more thoughtful approach is to present some options: ‘I was thinking about buying you one of these three things, which do you like the most?’, or to ask for a hint, a nudge in the right direction rather than an itemised list. This helps ensure you get them something they actually want, but also allows you to put some thought into it. Another variant of this approach is ‘Pick any two items in this shop and I will buy them for you’.
Stating a budget can be a little awkward depending on how you feel about talking about money. If you don’t state one then people will guess at one and then go a bit lower than that so that they don’t appear greedy.
Make use of expertise
Just as your recipient is an expert in some things, so are you. Where they have an expertise gap, use your expertise to give them a high quality gift. If you are a oenophile, buy them an excellent bottle of wine and explain what makes it so excellent. If you have an eye for art then buy something from an undiscovered Da Vinci.
Of course, this relies on you being an expert in something that your recipient likes, and this is not always the case. In those situations, find someone who is. If you know your partner loves model trains but you can’t tell Gauge 1 from S scale then visit a hobby shop or online forum and ask for help. Hobbyists are almost always happy to help and will be able to guide you towards something suitable.
Again, this shows far more thought than picking a random locomotive and hoping for the best, and is also far more likely to result in your recipient really appreciating their gift.
When in doubt, go for quality
Most things have a few tiers of quality, so an easy way to up your gift game is to go up one tier and buy a higher quality gift. Quality usually (but not always) costs money, but since you are ignoring deadlines money stops being a problem: if, ordinarily, you would spend £20 on a gift and the quality option costs £40, then simply wait twice as long between gifts than you would have otherwise.
An alternative if you are cash poor and time rich is to do the digging to find quality at low prices. If you look for gifts in a high street chain then you are often paying a premium for the convenience. Independent retailers, particularly online ones can often outcompete on both price and quality, but you have to be willing to put the effort in to track them down. I find Etsy particularly good for this – you can find some real gems, but you must first wade through a torrent of excrement in the form of items that will eventually make their way to Regretsy, a blog chronicling the worst of the world of handcrafted merchandise.
What is a good gift?
I have talked a lot about good gifts, but not yet described what one is. I define a good gift as something that the recipient wants but would not otherwise buy themselves.
This might seem like something of a contradiction - if they want it why wouldn’t they buy it themselves?
Firstly, if it’s something they were going to buy themselves anyway, then the gift is just a glorified cash transfer. More importantly though, there are two main reasons someone would not buy something for themselves that make such a gift much more meaningful.
The first is that they might not be able to afford it or be comfortable spoiling themselves. If you are the richer person in the relationship then you can buy things that would normally be out of their price range. I have a much lower budget when buying things for myself than I do when buying them as gifts.
More often though, they would not buy the thing because they do not know that it exists or have no way of buying it. It might be from an independent shop that they’ve never heard of, an antique that is no longer widely available, a souvenir of a foreign trip, or something custom made for them.
A good gift need not be something that is bought or costs a lot of money. The most important gift I ever received was handmade for me from an ordinary pack of playing cards, with a short note on each card. The total cost was probably less than £10, but my God the thought counted.
J. Dudley