Devil's Advocate: Is gift-giving a burden?

YES: Agata Mala

Ah, the holiday season: a time for joy, togetherness, and being crushed under the societal obligation to give gifts. What could be better than frantically scouring crowded malls or doom-scrolling online stores to find ‘the perfect gift’ for every person you’ve ever had more than a passing interaction with? Let’s face it — gift-giving has devolved into a performative nightmare, a high-stakes game where the rules are murky at best and actively harmful at worst.

First, let’s address the most obvious downside: the financial strain. In a world where inflation makes a carton of eggs feel like a luxury item, the last thing anyone needs is a cultural mandate to drop half a paycheck on scented candles, novelty socks, and electronics no one asked for. The pressure to buy gifts for your extended family, coworkers, friends, and that one cousin you only see at weddings is absurd. For many, this ritual transforms December into a credit card Armageddon. And for what? So someone can politely thank you for a gadget they’ll never use before “accidentally” re-gifting it next year? 

Then there’s the environmental catastrophe. Think about it: mountains of packaging, countless plastic trinkets, and piles of unwanted items destined for landfills. The holiday season is a glittery disaster for the planet. Is destroying the earth really the ultimate holiday tradition? Santa may as well trade in his sleigh for a rubbish truck.

But putting aside the financial and environmental strain, the heart of the issue lies in the very foundation of gift-giving: mandatory reciprocity. When you give someone a gift, you’re not just handing over an object — you’re giving them an obligation. A social contract, if you will. They must now reciprocate with a gift of equal value, perfectly aligned to reflect the depth of your relationship. Get it wrong, and disaster strikes. Give a gift that’s too expensive, and you look like you’re trying to show them up. Too cheap? You risk being labelled a miser. Mismatched emotional significance? Prepare for an existential rift in your friendship. The pressure is suffocating.

And let’s not forget the absurdity of trying to decipher what level of affection a gift communicates. Did you mean for this book to say “I deeply value our intellectual bond,” or “I forgot about you until five minutes ago, so here’s something I found at the checkout counter”? One wrong move, and your relationship becomes the emotional equivalent of eggnog: thick, uncomfortable, and vaguely sour. What happened to the idea that holidays are about celebrating with loved ones? The time spent together laughing, reminiscing, or binge-watching bad Christmas movies is priceless (well, technically it’s free, which is even better). Instead of swapping impersonal gifts, why not swap stories or memories? A conversation costs nothing, doesn’t destroy the environment, and doesn’t come with a receipt.

So this holiday season, dare to rebel. Say no to the tyranny of gift giving. Save your money, save the planet, and save yourself from the emotional gymnastics of reciprocity. Because the best gift of all is freeing yourself from the madness. Well, that and not receiving another pair of socks.

NO: Truman Cunningham

Gift-giving on Christmas can be an annoyance — when we feel obligated to jump on Amazon to find something cheap for whatever name you drew in the family secret Santa. But to me, gift-giving doesn’t have to be in the thrall of Christmas consumerism — finding thoughtful presents for loved ones is an ancient and essential way of building social bonds. And despite vast amounts of money poured into Christmas shopping each year, the price of a gift matters far less than the consideration which went into it.

The philosopher Marcel Mauss argued that gift-giving is a means by which we can measure the altruism of various cultures. Cultures that place greater emphasis on gift-giving are more communitarian, more peaceful, and even more egalitarian than our modern Scrooge-like cultures: individualist, unequal, and often prone to hostility. We may benefit from giving gifts more than we think we do, claims Mauss, like the Chinook people whose communal gift-giving ceremonies gave us the word ‘potlatch’. 

Some anthropologists go so far as to identify separate gift-giving and market societies. In the former, social bonds are reinforced by free exchanges of goods like food, crafts, services, etc. In the latter, money and bartering are the means by which people acquire goods. It seems like almost every prehistoric society was a gift-giving one. Our distant ancestors had no need for Venmo transfers, they exchanged bones, rocks, and who knows what else to show their fellow tribe-members that they valued them. Such strengthening of social bonds kept the group together — much like the bottle of whiskey you give a distant cousin on Christmas.

Granted, Christmas gift-giving today has become a grotesque display, with price tags often mattering more than recipients. Billions of pounds are spent over the holidays, including about £300 per person on presents alone in the UK. But Jeff Bezos and his warehouse workers (God bless them) are a paltry replacement for Santa and his elves, and we shouldn’t shy away from giving thoughtful gifts because we think we ought to give expensive ones. It’s a 21st-century fallacy to think that monetary value corresponds in any way to how much the recipient will appreciate our gift. 

Books are a good example of this. They’re generally cheap, so your thoughtfulness and consideration comes to the fore when you pick out a title you know someone will really like. And even if it ends up on a friend or family member’s shelf unread, the mere fact that you’ve combed through Topping’s for something they might like won’t go unnoticed. Gift-giving doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming, it just requires a little consideration. 

Gift-giving on certain holidays is one of the most ancient and universal of human behaviours, predating the rise of consumer culture and market economies by hundreds of thousands of years. Far from a burden, we should view the practice as an opportunity to push back on consumerism and show how much we appreciate our loved ones. After all, what could be less capitalist than family and free things?

Illustration by Magdalena Yiacoumi