Nine Adults, Nine Gifts, and Nobody Wanted Most of Them

My brother in law got a cheese board last year. He has, at conservative estimate, four cheese boards. He said thank you in the voice people use for cheese boards, and put it under the chair.

Somewhere in the same room was a woman who had spent an hour choosing it, and forty dollars, and had driven it over.

Here is what works, and how to raise it without a row.

Why the current arrangement disappoints everyone

The economist Joel Waldfogel put a number on this. He asked people what their Christmas gifts had cost and what they would have been willing to pay for those same gifts themselves. The second figure was consistently lower.

In one survey the gifts cost around $438 and were valued by the people who received them at about $313. In another, $509 of gifts came out at $462. Waldfogel called the difference the deadweight loss of Christmas, and estimated that between a tenth and a third of the price of a typical gift simply evaporates.

That is not an argument for giving cash, and I would not enjoy a Christmas run that way. It is an argument for one thing only: the guessing is where the value goes. Every time somebody buys for a person whose taste they do not really know, a chunk of the money turns into a cheese board under a chair.

Four systems that work

• Draw names. One adult buys for one adult, budget agreed, wish list of three or four things per person. This is the default for a reason. It cuts twelve gifts to four and raises the spend on each.
• Consumables only. Everything given has to be eaten, drunk, burned or used up by February. No storage, no guilt, nothing to display for a decade out of politeness.
• One experience together. Everyone contributes what they would have spent, and it buys a day out or a meal in January when there is nothing else on. Works particularly well for families who see each other rarely.
• Charity draw. Each adult gives their amount in another adult’s name, to something that person cares about. Then a card at the table saying where it went. Better than it sounds, and it survives the years when somebody is out of work.

Any of these beats the current arrangement. The one to avoid is the halfway house where three people opt out and everyone else carries on, because that produces exactly the awkwardness the change was supposed to remove.

The wish list is not unromantic

Somebody in your family will object that a list takes the thought out of it. The research says the opposite: people are consistently more appreciative of things they explicitly asked for, while givers assume the surprise will land just as well. The surprise is the risk, not the gift.

Ask everyone for three or four specific things with a range of prices. It reads as boring. It produces gifts people keep.

How to raise it without a row

Three rules, learned the hard way.

Raise it in October. Not in December, when people have bought things, and not on the day, which is a special kind of disaster. October is a planning conversation. December is a criticism of what somebody has already done.

Frame it around time and stress, not money. “I find the shopping stressful and I don’t think I’m buying anything anyone actually wants” is a sentence nobody can be offended by. “We can’t afford this” is true in many families and it invites either pity or an argument, and it lets one person quietly decide the whole thing is about your situation.

Ask, do not announce. Put it as a question with a specific alternative attached. “Would anyone be up for drawing names this year, thirty dollar limit?” Most families contain at least two people who have been hoping somebody else would say it first.

Keep the children out of it

This is the compromise that gets the proposal accepted almost every time. Adults draw names or stop entirely. Children carry on exactly as before.

It reassures the relative who is worried that Christmas is being cancelled, and it keeps the morning intact for the people who actually count parcels. Nobody under twelve has ever noticed how many gifts the adults gave each other.

Where it gets more delicate is across two households, when there are grandparents on both sides and a gift count that is quietly being compared. That is a different problem with its own arithmetic, and it is dealt with in the co-parenting Christmas schedule and in what to tell grandparents to buy.

What to do with the space it makes

The reason to do any of this is not the money saved. It is the afternoon you get back.

An exchange that takes four minutes instead of forty leaves the room free for the part people actually remember, which is not the opening of anything. We set out what that looks like in the traditions that cost nothing, and it is worth reading if you are worried that removing gifts removes the day.

This year we drew names in October. My brother in law drew me. He asked me directly what I wanted, I told him, and he bought exactly that and looked extremely pleased with himself about it.

Nobody got a cheese board.