This Christmas is different: rethinking our approach to gifting

Traditions change. Old customs get replaced. We swap comfortably familiar habits for more progressive ways of doing things.

This year, amid the urgency of our climate crisis and the toll it’s taking on some of the world’s poorest people, many of us might be tempted to finally break with the modern tradition of treating Christmas as one giant consumerism fest.

Research by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) last Christmas found that 44% of adults would rather have fewer gifts under the tree and see the money diverted to a good cause. Meanwhile, a Mintel report revealed that 29% of gift buyers last Christmas bought presents with a lower environmental impact, while 65% of buyers said retailers should make more of an effort to promote gifts that generate less waste.

“Concern about plastic waste and environmental damage really came into the mainstream [last year] and this wasn’t forgotten about when Christmas rolled around,” Thomas Slide, a senior analyst at Mintel, said of the report findings.

Other retail analysts attribute the change to something closer to consumer self-interest. “History shows that people’s social consciousness ranks way below their own direct economic wellbeing,” says retail expert Richard Hyman. “People are feeling anxious and uncertain about the future, though, and that is encouraging caution.”

Either way, festive gifting is changing. It isn’t about being a Scrooge or killjoy or ditching presents altogether. It’s about reimagining Christmas gifts to make them more sustainable and meaningful – whether it’s buying each other experiences instead of physical gifts, trawling charity shops for ethically produced products or pre-loved possessions, or pooling funds with loved ones to rent somewhere to get together over the break.

After all, Christmas gift-giving has long become unmoored from the Christmas spirit – distorted by a sense of obligatory quid pro quo and a feeling that we have to prove our affection with the price tag of our presents. It’s also economically inefficient.

Joel Waldfogel, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, has been studying the economic waste of festive gift-giving since 1993, when he coined the term “the deadweight loss of Christmas” in a research paper investigating how people waste their money trying to guess what someone else would like. He argued that gifts typically destroy value because the giver would pay more for a gift than the recipient would have been prepared to spend on it. His 2009 book Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays, expanded on his ideas.

“In the early 1990s … people were blinded by their good intentions, unable to see any problem in holiday gift-giving,” says Waldfogel. “People are now more concerned about both wastefulness and associated environmental degradation, as well as the awful juxtaposition of rich people getting stuff they don’t want while many problems of the truly needy are not addressed.”

A rethink of festive gifting has also been prompted by a glut of possessions and people’s tendency to live in smaller homes – a trend famously highlighted by Ikea’s former chief sustainability officer, Steve Howard, who, in 2016, declared that consumers in the west “have probably hit peak stuff”.

Since then, a variety of projects and ventures have sprung up to make it easier for consumers to reimagine Christmas gift-giving. One example is Advent of Change, which subverts the traditional advent calendar so that instead of doling out gifts or treats, each of the 24 doors reveals a donation to charity, which is included in the purchase price. “Christmas had become quite commercialised in recent years, but now it is changing quite rapidly the other way,” says founder Kristina Salceanu. “People are becoming a lot more aware that their purchases can have a big impact.”

There have also been a raft of alternative e-commerce sites, such as online marketplaces for handmade and vintage gifts. Patchwork, for instance, was set up as a group gifting platform akin to a digital whip-round. “The established convention for gift giving, especially at Christmas, is to get in a panic and spend money we don’t have buying people things they don’t need,” says founder Olivia Knight. “Most people use Patchwork to collectively fund experiences in lieu of physical gifts – they’re worried about the environmental impact of consumerism. We are increasingly seeing people using it to ask family to contribute gift money towards a good cause too.”