holiday gift exchange ideas for families

Tricia and Alex Koroknay-Palicz live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their 20-month-old daughter. Some people also consider gift-giving a distraction from the religious significance of the holidays. “After our family reflection on this, the answer has been clear: Ourselves, we bring more of ourselves.” She told me that her family’s Christmas-morning plan is to gather around the tree as in years past, whether there are presents underneath it or not. “When we remove material purchasing and consumption from the table, we are forced to question what we are bringing to instead-individually and collectively,” she said. Raagini Appadurai, a 26-year-old educator and social-justice advocate living in Toronto, told me that her family-her two sisters, her parents, and herself-made a no-gifts pact this year. At the very bottom of the list was skipping gifts entirely, which received a tepid 13 percent approval rating. Those surveyed rated other alternatives-giving homemade gifts, regifting, or buying things secondhand-as much less enticing. When presented with a slew of options that might lessen their financial stress, respondents were most willing to entertain the idea of giving gifts only to their immediate family or of seeking out coupons and sales-64 percent and 57 percent, respectively, said those courses of action would be acceptable. Read: The Christmas dilemma: How much of a kid’s wish list should parents oblige?Īccording to a recent survey from the personal-finance website Bankrate, almost half of Americans feel pressured to spend more than they’d like to on holiday gifts, with parents especially likely to feel put upon. Above all, they want to spend less money on things and more time with one another. No single cause unites these opt-outers, but a few motivations regularly pop up: They want to resist consumerism, restore the religious focus of the holidays, and/or avoid harming the environment. Hund is one of the many holiday celebrants who have been questioning and revising their long-held gift-giving traditions-or, in some cases, scrapping them altogether. “The first year I thought I would be sad about it,” she said, “and I really wasn’t.” Plus, they get meaningful presents through the regifting agreement, such as the Led Zeppelin record Hund received from her dad, purchased when he was in high school. Now, with the extra time she and her family have, they paint pottery together, cook, go on runs, and play cards. “I just remember coming home and being super stressed and last-minute trying to run out to the mall or looking online and seeing what I could get shipped in like three days,” said Hund, who’s 35 and works in tech in San Francisco. Hund and her family downscaled their gift-giving six years ago after considering how much work Christmas shopping was. “And my 18-month-old son got put in category too, so it’s small humans and small animals.” “The rules are basically a regift for the human and then $10 for the pet,” Hund told me. See the 48 best, last minute gifts to shop on Amazon in 2023 for your sister, brother, the whole family, or truly anyone in your life.This year, Heather Hund and her family will gather in West Texas on December 25 and solidify a new Christmas tradition, in which each relative is randomly assigned to give a gift to another family member and to a house pet. Or, alternatively, if you’ve procrastinated to the very last minute, Women’s Health has you covered there, too. No matter what time of year, it’s never a bad idea to keep your loved ones in mind, should you stumble upon the perfect gift. Still, from a simple gift card, to the most thoughtful handwritten note you could ever write, gift giving feels overwhelming. If you’re shopping for a totally new family (are you trying to impress your new, or could-be in-laws?), they’ll happily accept anything, too. Odds are, whoever you’re shopping for in your fam will love whatever you get them. Add multiple people to the mix, and you silently begin hoping that ‘receiving gifts’ is not their love language. Is there anyone harder to shop for than the people you love the most? I don’t think so. The act of giving a gift is the best-of course, once the shopping is done and it’s in the hands of the receiver.

Holiday gift exchange ideas for families