Why is it so hard to stop shopping? — Part3: Materialistic gift giving culture
Gift giving is an integral part of our culture. We have many occasions to splurge on our loved ones, birthdays, weddings, diplomas, anniversaries, but Christmas is the biggest of them all.
In 2020 retail sales in the US soared by $789.4 billion during the holidays. Just to put it in perspective, Saudi Arabia’s GDP is $687 billion. The average gift budget was approximately $700 spent on fashion and clothing, electronics, toys, and home and kitchenware. While 1 in 3 Americans expect to go into debt to buy christmas presents this year, 61% of Amercians (154 million people) express that they get at least one unwanted gift. That is a minimum of 154 million pieces of gifts that Americans shouldn’t have bought. Finder estimates that americans wasted $15.2 billion on unwanted gifts.
(Here I used stats from the US because those are the most available, but the tendencies in wasteful gifting habits are similar in Europe.)
We have a problem here folks! We buy crap for others that they don’t want or need from the money we don’t have.
If gifting is such a big burden, why do we do it? Why do we feel the need to take on debt just to buy presents for others? Why do we feel obliged to give each other crap we don’t need? Why is it quantity over quality when it comes to gifts?
Before I discuss these questions, I want to start by saying that giving gifts is not inherently evil. Obviously. Thoughtful gifts can bring us joy, strengthen our relationships, season our lives with surprises, and help us handle new life situations (for example new parents getting a stroller as a gift.) This article is not about criticising the tradition of gift giving, but rather what it had become in the 20th century. The mindless and toxic gifting traditions that we perform year after year thanks to clever marketing and social pressure.
Toxic for the planet, because of the resources used up to produce and distribute all the crap we buy, and let’s not forget about the waste from all the unwanted gifts that go straight to the landfill from under the tree. Toxic for the giver, because they can spend up to 20 hours searching for gifts, and can end up in debt, not to mention all the stress that comes with all this. And finally, toxic for the receiver because they are burdened with presents that they don’t want, and it becomes their responsibility to dispose of them (hopefully responsibly) or store them in the back of the closet where they become clutter.
But Christmas hasn’t always been about excessive gift giving.
Christmas in Europe was originally a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus by sharing meals and love with others. German, Dutch and English immigrants brought their Christmas traditions to the US around the 17th century, and over time these traditions were shaped to fit the American lifestyle and way of thinking. As Dr. Ruth McClelland-Nugent, a pop culture scholar says:
“Capitalism helps take these sorts of European traditions from two different places — the German tradition and the English tradition — and meld them into something new.”
Around the mid 19th century retailers in the US smelled the profit they could make from selling gifts for this special occasion. From that point on, Christmas has transformed into a cultural and most importantly a commercial phenomena. Profit-hungry companies and their marketing departments shaped Christmas as we know it today.
For example, the modern Santa Claus is the result of commercial ambitions. Before the well-known jolly and plump father figure there were many different depictions of the character, some elvish and some were even grumpy. Today’s Santa is based on a religious figure, St. Nicholas, who brought chocolate to children on the 6th of December in European culture. Santa kept Nick’s red robes and generous giving character but otherwise were revamped into a friendly enough figure to appear in advertising and sell products. While Coca-Cola is the most well-known company who used Santa in their ads, there were many other brands and artists who took their fair share in shaping this figure. According to Coke’s webpage:
“Coca-Cola did not create the legend of Santa Claus. But Coca-Cola advertising did play a big role in shaping the jolly character we know today.”
Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, is a result of content marketing. Montgomery Ward (department store) commissioned Robert Lewis May to write a story for their yearly Christmas coloring book. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted in 1939 and was sold in 2.4 million copies.
Department stores also learned how to capture the financial value of the holiday spirit. To entice customers, department stores arranged tasteful Christmas decorations to put customers in a jolly mood and encourage them to open their wallets. In 1862 Macy’s was the first department store to have a live Santa as part of their marketing campaign, and thanks to the overwhelming success, mall Santas have become fixtures of the modern holiday shopping.
In a nutshell, from Rudolph to Santa to some of the most quintessential decorations, are results of commercial interests to exploit traditions and sentiments for a profit.
Today, Christmas is the pinnacle of consumerism, stores starting Christmas marketing as early as October, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday morphing into one long shopping season. People are spending morbid amount of money in attempts to express their love and appreciation towards others. As Dr. Paul Harrison, a consumer behaviour expert explains:
“One norm of behaviour that has evolved over time, partly through clever conditioning of consumers by skilled marketers, is to equate the amount of money we spend on a gift to how much we value or love the recipient. That notion, inadvertently, is not great for consumption and the environment.”
Marketers, job well done, that is exactly what we do today. If we want to show how much we love someone we buy a bunch of stuff for them. But what are all those stuff worth if nobody knows about them?
Spoiling children with gifts is a trendy social media content. Maybe it is because parents take inspiration from “Christmas wishlist” videos, where youtubers share x amount of Christmas gift ideas. If you don’t have ideas about what to ask for Christmas, you can just pick one of the items that stand on the list. You don’t need any of it? That is not the point. The point is: you get gifts for Christmas. So even if you don’t need anything (because let’s face it, if you really needed something, you would have known that without getting inspiration from someone else) you can still ask for crap you will use for 2 weeks.
After Christmas starts the flow of vlogs about “what I got for Christmas haul” where kids/teens spend half an hour to show all the items they got one by one. In the disclaimer they usually mention that Christmas is not about getting gifts, it is also about giving, but most importantly spending time with family. After watching them pulling out 20–50 gifts, I question the genuineness of their words for some reason. And I’m also wondering, if giving is equally important, why there are no “what I gave for Christmas” videos?
Sometimes parents even make their kids open their heaps of Christmas gifts in front of the camera. But it is equally easy to peek into a Kardashian Christmas and see how Kylie Jenner’s one year old gets a diamond ring and a luxury playhouse.
It is not only the kids who use social media to display their expensive or excessive amount of gifts. Girlfriends use #boydidgood to brag about the perfect gifts they get from their boyfriends. Or apparently use the hashtag on gifts that they bought for themselves to save themselves from some humiliation if the boyfriend’s gift was not up to the standards.
These social media contents shape, perhaps rather distort, the perception of the younger generation about the purpose and scope of gift giving. Kids’ expectations towards Santa can grow unrealistic and if those expectations are not fulfilled, tantrums are in place. Parents comply, maybe because they genuinely believe that more crap will make their children happy, or maybe because they are just mindlessly following the norms portrayed in social media.
Christmas is a great example of how clever marketing and distorted depiction of social norms work hand in hand to reinforce and promote consumerism and materialistic values. And while it can be detrimental for the planet, our mental health, and financial well-being, it is rather convenient for companies. After all holiday shopping can account for up to 30% of all retail sales. And that is what really counts.
While the materialistic gift giving culture is going strong and it still dominates the market and people’s mindset, it doesn’t mean that everybody participates in it. There are many examples of opting out from obligatory gift giving or giving more mindful gifts. However these approaches are sometimes still frowned upon and usually underrepresented in mainstream media. For example if you look at popular gift guidelines, (or the wishlist videos) you will find that 98% of the list is stuff, and only 2% is about non-material gifts.
So here we go, this is how our gifting culture makes it hard to stop shopping. But we must change this. This excessive gift giving is ruining the planet and leave us in debt, but more frighteningly builds unsustainable expectations and social norms for the generations to come.
As I said in the beginning, gifts can be great and useful. We just have to become better at finding gifts that bring value to our lives. And we have to learn to be okay with not giving /getting gifts when we don’t need them.
I think people need a lot of help and education to get over these unsustainable gift giving norms. That is why I started a new Instagram account. Gifts_but_better will be a platform where I’m going to collect ideas for how to give better gifts: non-material, budget friendly and thoughtful. So if you are interested, follow me there!
