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Why We Love to Gift

Our culture divides the world into the public and the private. The public is for business, impersonality, contracts, cold reason, politics, officialdom, money and legal obligation. The private is everything the public is not — warm emotional involvement with family and friends, love, the unofficial, the uncalculating. We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.

But lots of things are given at Christmas to people we scarcely know or for whom we feel little warmth — to clients, colleagues, children’s teachers or people we ought to remember but seldom do. Giving then spills over into the calculating, the public, the area of social pressure and of obligation. Yet we call these presents “gifts,” even though a gift not given freely is no gift at all. Contradictions to which we pay too little attention become irritatingly apparent. The feast makes us pause and reconsider. In many cultures, obligatory giving is perfectly normal. People know exactly what to give on what occasion, and how much the gift should cost. Leaving the price on a present is therefore quite acceptable, and so is handing on a conventional present to someone else.

The lack of a word for what for us is not a gift has clearly been felt by users of American English. An obsolete verb, “to gift,” has been picked up and given new work to do. “Gifting” is often used now for handing people objects disguised as gifts for the purpose of carrying out conventions and socially imposed duties. These are operations we define as utterly distinct from giving — although it must be admitted that motives and emotions are seldom either pure or simple.

The practice of “regifting,” or handing on an unwanted gift to someone else, goes too far in the opinion of many of us. We can tell that from the way people who “regift” take care that the original giver should not find out. In Japan, should receivers of obligatory gifts hand them on to others, they do so openly and without offense.

After the return of the verb “to gift,” why have we not found an alternative noun for gifts? Perhaps it is because we need some vagueness behind which to conceal unworthy motives, for the sake of other people’s feelings as well as our own. Love and gratitude cannot be demanded from anyone. Yet sometimes we want or even need to appear to feel what we do not.

A person is grateful to receive a gift precisely to the degree to which she realises that the giver wants to give it, that real benevolence is its meaning. If you “gift” something, offering a present entirely out of duty or convention, do not expect gratitude: receivers usually know what the present represents.

But gratitude is the receiver’s to give should she want to. In fact, gratitude is like any true gift, both intentional and gratis. In times when duty and politeness seem to be in decline, receivers are capable of being grateful to people who are dutiful. Therefore, should “gifting” take place at Christmas, people who think will be capable of gratitude for “gifting” too.

Money is not the point. Our son, as a child, once gave us a Pyrex lemon squeezer for Christmas, of the kind driven by hand-and-wrist power, with little spikes to catch the pips.

For 30 years we have thought of him (on and off, and more or less) every time we squeezed a lemon. The other day the object fell off our kitchen counter and broke. We are both very upset. We’ll buy another lemon squeezer of course. But salad-making in our house will never be quite the same again.

Margaret Visser is the author of “The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude”

© IHT