Who Realised Gift-Giving Had Rules?

Over at OrganisedChristmas.com, I found a great article that fires a shot through some of our gift-giving thinking.

They’re seldom acknowledged and rarely discussed: the unwritten rules of gift giving. Even if we don’t talk about them, “the rules” determine what we give, how much we give, and to whom we give. They govern everything from the office Secret Santa exchange, to classroom gifts, to a family morning under the Christmas tree.

Problem is, “unwritten” means that gift-giving rules are subject to interpretation—both in our own minds, and in our dealings with others.

First, if you don’t understand why you gift as you do, it’s easy to enter the land of the absurd: making a midnight raid on the supermarket’s toy aisle when you discover that one child’s stocking holds fewer gifts than his brother’s. Unexamined gift-giving assumptions lead to gifting decisions that can violate your own values—and worse, those decisions can appear to operate from nowhere! [more]

The Unwritten Rules of Gift-Giving gives you plenty of food for thought about how and why we come to be giving gifts to the people we do.  It certainly allows you to think before all your gift-giving and possible guilt and angst have pooled into a sanity- breaking December 25th.

Or at the very least it might be fuel for new decisions and negotiations for next year!