Christmas and the hard truth about gifting, re-gifting and de-gifting 

With the joyous celebration of Christmas comes the cherished ritual of spending time with those we love most in life. In some cases, this can include our family.

Intrinsic to any such gathering is the giving of gifts to children – always a wonderful experience full of fun, laughter and the occasional punch on.

Most enjoyable is observing the unfettered glee of a kid getting the very present they prayed to Santa for.

During this brief burst of euphoria it’s possible to notice something important, something that makes you reflect on how our appreciation of gifts drastically changes as we age.

It seems that the younger the child is, the more joy they appear to get from the simplest of things: some elastic rubber man that climbs down the wall; a toy car that plays music; even the box a present came in can be enough to send a kid into a state of rapture.

As you sit there observing this flourish of innocence you begin to realise an Unavoidable Truth: the older you get, the harder it is to match that degree of bliss from a gift – whether received from others or given to yourself as a reward for all your hard graft and saving.

Nothing is ever quite good enough.

It usually starts small, often with shoes that pinch and kitchen appliances that, despite the 101 functions that are supposed to make life easier, take up too much room on the kitchen counter.

Then comes the big-screen TV that doesn’t look as good as it did in the showroom and the gleaming new gizmo-crammed car that turns out to be a compendium of glitches.

You’ve worked so hard for that in-ground swimming pool, yet while everyone else seems to be enjoying it all you can do is gripe about the maintenance, scooping up leaves and the robot pool cleaner that you are convinced will become sentient and turn on you.

As for people, they never get you what you want, even when you tell them. It’s always the wrong size, the wrong model, the wrong style, the wrong brand.

Still, you feign your appreciation, secretly owing to get rid of the thing. This has given rise to the dubious practice of regifting.

For those fortunate souls who have somehow been spared exposure to this travesty of modern life, regifting is the tradition of taking a gift you pretended to like and giving it to someone else.

This is contingent, of course, on making absolutely sure the person you regift to and the person who gave you the gift in the first place never make contact.

This custom has become so widespread there are occasions when an unwanted gift has been regifted so many times it ends up in the mitts of the poor sod who gave the gift in the first place.

At this point one of two things occur: either everybody has a good laugh at the debacle or friendships end. Depends on your level of sophistication.

At the other end of the spectrum is the less popular, slightly more civilised Christmas ritual of degifting.

Never heard of it? In essence, degifting is when people replace the need to receive with the desire to give.

An instance of this will see a family – usually a wealthy one – forego giving gifts to each other and instead donate what they were going to spend to charity.

Oftentimes these donations are done anonymously. That’s right. They actually give without expecting anything in return.

On top of that, there are also those who, come Christmas time, will volunteer to spend the day helping the needy.

Hearing of such cases you can’t help but wonder – What planet are these people from?

Initially, one feels great spiritual uplift that such selflessness exists in this world of money grubbing, material-obsessed cynics who spend all their time thinking about themselves.

Then a moment later the heart sinks as you realise that you’re one of those people, that if Santa turned up in your lounge room bearing gifts and joy, you’d have him up on a break-and-enter.

If only, at that time of year when the meaning of giving gifts is at its peak, you could do something – anything – more meaningful.

Then the thought hits you. With piercing moral clarity, it strikes your soul like a bolt from The Almighty.

Charity.

How better to offload – sorry – regift this thing you didn’t ask for?