The Gift of Giving
I hope you enjoy this 4 minute-long present
Christmas has been celebrated as a religious festival since 350AD when Pope Julius I officially marked Christmas Day as 25th December
Around the world, 2 billion people (or a 3rd of the World’s population) will be celebrating Christmas, either officially or unofficially (there are 14 countries where celebrating Christmas is either illegal or discouraged)
While Christmas is still very much a religious festival, there are now other aspects to the holiday period - some of which are less pious
So what else are people doing at Christmas? To put it simply…presents!!
How much do people spend on presents around Christmas?
People spend a lot on Christmas gifts. An average household in Britain will spend an extra £740 in December compared to a typical month (or 30% more). When looking at the items we normally buy in December, we spend:
- twice as much on Books as we do in a normal month
- 61% more on phones and computers
- 50% more on clothes
- 33% more on alcohol and tobacco
This is also the case in the United States too. Deloitte estimated that Americans spent $1.1 trillion on Christmas in 2019. On average, each respondent planned on spending just under $1,000 on gifts each year and an additional $500 on other items like food for Christmas Dinner
A poll by Gallup showed that each American intended to spend $886, on average, on Christmas gifts last year
And this can make life difficult for people who can’t afford to spend a lot more
According to a US survey, 10% of people go into debt to afford their Christmas shopping, and 41% of respondents said they were willing to take on debt to buy gifts for the holidays
How many presents are bought online?
Like with a lot of consumer spending, more Christmas gifts are being bought online than ever before
In 2008, only 5% of presents in Britain were bought online. This number had risen to 18% by 2018 and 21% in 2019. Following the pandemic, this number is likely to be even higher - its expected that 44% of all Christmas presents would be bought online in 2022
In America, 56% of respondents said they’d purchase some of their presents online in 2021. The next more common shopping channels were Discount stores (29%), Department stores (24%) and Specialty stores (18%)
Amazon continues to be one of the main beneficiaries of all this shopping in the west. It was estimated to earn revenues of c. $148 billion from the Christmas period (similar to Morocco’s annual GDP)
On their busiest day of the season, Amazon received 46 orders per second
How much waste is there at Christmas?
A lot of people don’t like all of their gifts (or sometimes any of them)
A study by ING suggested that 1 in 7 people in Europe were unhappy with the presents they’d received at Christmas, and 10% of them couldn’t even remember what they’d been given
Most people kept their unwanted gifts or re-gifted them, but 14% sold them on, 10% took them back to the original store and 5% simply gave the gift back to the giver (apparently this was most common with the British and Dutch)
In America, it’s estimated that people spend $15.2 billion on unwanted gifts each year, and 62% of Americans expect to receive at least one every year
It’s very telling that 56% of US consumers say that they would rather receive a gift card than an actual present, potentially to limit the number of unwanted gifts they receive
And the waste is not just with gifts. A typical British household generates more than 3 full bin bags worth of waste each Christmas, which include:
- 227,000 miles of wrapping paper (which is enough to go round the Earth 9 times), and 114,000 tonnes of plastic wrapping
- 175,000 tonnes of aluminum foil used for mince pies (equivalent to the weight of over 430 Airbus 380s)
- 300,000 tonnes of card / cardboard. When looking at just the cardboard used for Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, this is enough to cover an area larger than Central London
- 50% of household report spending too much on food over Christmas, with the equivalent to 4.2 million Christmas dinners going to waste (the same as 263,000 turkeys, 7.5 million mince pies, 740,000 slices of Christmas pudding, 17.2 million Brussels sprouts, 11.9 million carrots and 11.3 million roast potatoes)
So finally, are you going to be more or less generous than your friends and family this year?
Well, a YouGov poll showed that a lot of people felt like they received a similar number of presents than they gave (45%), but a significant proportion (33%) gave more gifts than they received
When asked how many gifts each respondent of the same survey would be giving, the most common answer was 1–10 gifts (41%) with 5% of respondents saying they gave over 30 gifts and a further 5% saying they gave no gifts at all!
Whether you can afford the luxury of numerous gifts, limiting your waste production this season, or just focusing on being with the ones you love in these difficult economic times; remember what Eleanor Roosevelt once said… “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present!”
Wishing you all the happiest of holidays!
Check out more GoodStats on society here:
- Alllllll the people…So many people!
- Watch Your Language! Now that we understand
- Celebrating International Women’s Day; The women who led the way
