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The Secret Language of Giving Christmas
Gifts
Millions of dollars are wasted every year
at Christmas time because many people fail to understand the
secret language of giving gifts.
The psychology of Christmas is fertile
ground for researchers. Dr Carole Burgoyne of the University of
Exeter and David Routh of Bristol University have spent years
developing tests to uncover the psychological meaning of
Christmas. “One surprising result was that Father Christmas was
regarded as one of the sacred symbols of Christmas, along with
carol singing, midnight mass, spiritual reflections and
rituals,” says Dr Burgoyne. “In the minds of some, Father
Christmas has regained some of his earlier, more sacred
meanings.”
The researchers, however, say that the
greatest puzzle was why so many people fall for the commercial
hype and spend so much time, energy and money on presents that
the recipients often find disappointing. “The ‘dead-weight’ loss
of Christmas (as one economist puts it) is enormous,” says Mr
Routh.
Between One Tenth and One Third of Money
Spent On Christmas Presents is Wasted
“Something like a tenth to a third of the
money spent is apparently wasted because recipients don’t always
receive what they would like,” he says. He points to the number
of people who keep receipts for Christmas gifts almost expecting
their gifts to be exchanged by the recipient.
This waste of money can be reduced if
people only understood the secret language of giving gifts.
“Although most are motivated by family ties, people give for all
sorts of other reasons as well: to show off their wealth, get a
gift in return, manipulate others, repair relationships and
relieve guilt,” says Mr Routh.
Gift Giving Is One of the Most Stressful
Yuletide Activities
Gift giving has
its downsides, though. “While this activity might be fun for a
few,” says Professor Adrian Furnham of University College,
London, “For many it presents one of the most stressful aspects
of the whole Yuletide experience.. It is an obstacle course of
hidden faux pas, crypto messages and subtle communications. The
celebration of Christmas is understood by all to be largely for
children’s benefit. But don’t believe it – it is a great test
of insight and skill, of really understanding the complexities
of relationships.”
The Origins of Gift Giving
In primitive societies, gift giving was a
way of forging bonds with strangers. Marcel Mauss in his book
Essai sur le don (1925) says that this was important when
there was no centralised law enforcement in society. He says
that in those societies, there was no gift without bond, without
bind, without obligation on the part of the recipient to the
giver.
American anthropologist Professor Marshall Sahlins stated
that that this obligation on the part of the recipient
diminished the closer the kinship between the giver and the
recipient. Correspondingly, sentiment on the part of the donor
increased. Within a family, there was no tally kept on who
spent what on whom. Within the larger tribe, care had to be
taken to ensure that one gave as good as one got.
Theodore Caplow of the University of
Virginia found in a study of a Midwestern community that the
vast majority of gifts went to those within the nuclear family.
Gifts outside the family he found to be more conditional – there
was a growing emphasis on reciprocation when it came to the
extended family. In a separate study, he found that people who
did not give a gift to someone who was previously on their list
of recipients expected that relationship to wane.
The maintenance of relationships is one
reason to maintain, and indeed expand, the list of recipients of
gifts to clients of a business. The inference is that the lack
of at least a small gift is that the erstwhile donor does not
expect the business relationship to last into the next year.
Gift for employees are similar. Employers
often regard salary, motor vehicles and bonuses as due reward to
employees. Employees, however, feel that these items are simply
basic propositions or table stakes. A small gift at Christmas
time, however, personalises the relationship again for the
coming year. A difficulty in this custom has emerged in
Australia in the form of Fringe Benefits Tax – the value of many
gifts to employees is now taxable. One exception, however, is a
gift of wine at Christmas time – this has its own Income Tax
Ruling that exempts gifts of wine from FBT.
Men Shop Differently to Women
“Nearly everywhere, women take
responsibility for Christmas shopping and gift-wrapping, and
give more gifts in their own names than men,” says Professor
Furnham. “But men give twice as many substantial gifts and many
fewer token gifts than women.
Men, says Professor Furnham, need to
understand the hidden language of gift giving. “As a channel of
communication, it has limited capacity because the range of
messages is few and the language not well known. Perhaps the
gift-phobics who discuourage the exchange of gifts between
family and friends do so because they don’t speak the language
and agree with Wittgenstein, who so wisely noted, ‘Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Whether to Give More or Less Than You
Receive
At Christmas time, a husband is expected to buy his wife
presents which are more valuable than hers are to him, and more
valuable
than his present to his parents, in order
to say, ‘I value you more than my parents.’ But that does not
go for adult friends. They can embarrass each other by the
generosity of the present and so (sometimes deliberately) incur
a debt. “Feeling emotionally in debt is uncomfortable,
particularly for the guilt-prone. Better to err on under-rather
than over-payment,” says Prof Furnham.
The Problem With Personalising
Mass-Market Gifts
The problem with personalising mass market
gifts is that they usually simply cannot be personalised. There
are some companies that manufacture personalised items such as
pens and diaries, but they require significant orders of
hundreds or even thousands of items. Rarely does one find a
personalised gift that can be purchased by the half dozen or
dozen, such as the Killerby Christmas Gift Box, for example.
The Definition of the Perfect Christmas
Gift
The perfect gift, says Prof Furnham, is one
that the recipient really wants, enjoys and appreciates, and
possibly would not buy for himself. “Above all, it shows the
depth of personal understanding of the other – sometimes even
more than they understand themselves.”
The best predictor of how much a gift is
appreciated is the amount of time put into choosing, making or
preparing it. We live in a commodity culture, one where we use
money to buy impersonal, mass-produced objects made for profit
by people we’ve never met. Moaning about the misery of battling
through the Christmas crowds is, in effect, trying to
personalize a mass-produced gift.
For the same reasons, says Prof Furnham,
this is why money is usually (except for children) unacceptable
as a present, while and hand-made gift or a personalised gift is
worth more than anything simply bought in a shop. The giver has
given time and ‘of themselves.’
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