During this holiday season it seemed appropriate to discuss gift giving and receiving this week. Having just read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which the famous Ebenezer Scrooge undergoes a drastic transformation from a miser into a generous giver, I began to reflect on the change into attitude experienced towards Christmas and giving in general as one gets older. As a child one looks forward to Christmas thinking of all the presents you might get and what you’ll do with them when you finally get them, with little or no thought for giving anything to anyone else. As Dickens said in A Christmas Carol:
…for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.
Christmas as a child is a magical time, the only other day that really compares is your birthday. As a child it’s easy to come up with a long list of things you’d like to receive for Christmas. Then later, as an adult, it becomes much harder to come up with gift ideas, most of the things you really want, you’ve probably already bought for yourself and anything you might want, you could likely easily get for yourself as well whenever you choose to.
Once we’re older though and have enough income to buy the things we want without having to rely on others to buy them for us as gifts, one’s perspective on Christmas and gift giving in general likely undergoes a complete reversal. It’s no longer about what you can get, but what you’ll get for others. We begin to care more about making others happy than about getting or keeping more stuff for ourselves. After Scrooge has met with the ghosts, he tells his clerk:
A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family…
When we give a gift we feel good, having done something nice for someone else. The act of giving can make us feel good both through internal and external means. We first feel good internally, before and as we are giving a gift from being generous, caring or helping someone else in someway. We then get a second boost from the external source of the other person receiving the gift, and hopefully responding positively and with gratitude. The giving of a gift, or even the gift itself doesn’t have to be extravagant to have this positive effect. I was reminded of a quote from Jack Keroac in The Dharma Bums about giving simple, not necessarily highly valuable gifts:
“Smith you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.” The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and somethings his gifts were old beat-up things, but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.
The simplest gifts can often be the most well received, the more care or effort we’ve put into a gift, especially if we’ve made it ourselves, instead of just buying something from a store, can make a gift much more memorable, and likely to be cherished. Similarly, a gift that requires someone to go out and doing something can produce memories that last a lifetime, which can be far more valuable than something bought at a store.
When someone gives a gift they get an emotional boost from the act of giving, a feeling of goodness from having done something nice for someone else. On the receiving side, there can be quite the opposite effect. After the initial warm feelings have worn off from receiving a gift, we’re left with a feeling of indebtedness, we now owe this person for what they have given us. This desire to reciprocate is part of our nature, as explained by Tren Griffin in Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor:
The urge to reciprocate favors and disfavors is so strong that even someone smiling at you is hard not to reciprocate. The indebted feeling that humans have when they receive a gift tends to make a person feel uncomfortable until he or she can extinguish the debt. The urge to reciprocate in some way so as to cancel the debt is so strong that it can even make people give up substantially more than they would if the process was fully rational.
When giving a gift a large part of the struggle when picking something out, beyond finding something that you think the person might like, is trying to match the value of what they have given you in the past, or what you expect they might give you in the future. We don’t want to not give enough and not fully payback or cancel out the debt we feel that we owe, while at the same time, not putting the recipient in too great of a debt to us. Although feelings of generosity can make us give more than is strictly necessary, it’s better to give too much, than to not give enough.
This holiday season, focus less on what you can get and more so on how you can give. Gifts don’t have to come from a store, even spending time with someone could be considered a gift. Instead of just buying something that they likely don’t really need, you could take them somewhere to do something they enjoy or have always wanted to try. We generally only think of getting material things for gifts, because it’s easy. Coming up with an idea of what to get might be difficult, or time consuming, but once you finally do, you can get it and give it and not give it another thought. The true spirit of giving is showing that you care, which can be expressed simply through the gift of your time.