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Let’s Stop Giving Christmas Gifts to Adults
We’ve all had them. We’ve all given them. The bad Christmas gift. The awful, panicked, last minute, hail Mary gift. Any old perfume for women. The aftershave gift pack for men. The cookery book from the latest flavour of the month TV chef (it’s perfect, you think: if they cook, they’ll love it, if they don’t cook, maybe they want to learn).
Full disclosure: in my 36 years of life I have done all of these. I’ve been on the receiving end too, some that particularly stick out are receiving the same book (from the same person) two years in a row — in fairness, the second time around the cover had changed — and getting a red t-shirt bearing “ENGLAND” in all caps. I’m Welsh.
Not to say that I resent bad gifts. I keep every gift I’m given. But buying for adults is hard. A lot of us already have the things we want and need, or we can get them. Anything we can’t get is likely to be too expensive to expect as a one-off gift.
So why do we do this to ourselves? Why, every Christmas, do we subject ourselves to the underwhelming gift exchange between family members (and/or friends)?
Let’s just buy presents for the kids instead? Or, if we must participate in giving other adults gifts, make joke-y, cheap presents the order of the day. Let’s take the stress out of Christmas, leave the gifts for the youngsters and relax instead of sending ourselves into debt buying things the other person probably doesn’t want anyway.
