This is a question that has confused many of us: how to cope loved more WHO only keep provide our bad gift.
The National Retail Federation estimates that last winter, approx worth $966 billion Merchandise was sold during the holiday season — and nearly $148 billion was returned. A Survey Consumer research firm CivicScience found that 28 percent of people returned or exchanged a gift in the past year. According to StatesmanThe most desired Christmas gift among US consumers is cold hard cash. The second most popular? Gift cards. The message seems to be: Thanks for the thought, but let me choose what I want.
Within a year, let alone a lifetime, you can accumulate piles of things you’ll never use, taking up valuable space in your home. Do you harden your heart and just give it all up? Do you try to return every unwanted item as soon as you receive it? What about things that don’t evoke joy, but have some sentimental value?
Standard etiquette advises us to be kind even in the face of ridiculously bad gifts, but research in the social psychology of gift-giving suggests we give bad gift-givers too much benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, an unnecessary gift is purposefully inappropriate; It’s not just miscommunication, but negative, even annoying, communication. At the heart of solving this perennial problem is taking a good look at what motivates us to give to others in the first place.
How to politely deal with well-meaning – but unwanted – gifts
The question of what to do with gifts you don’t use is a popular etiquette question “in an increasingly consumerist world,” according to etiquette expert Danielle Post Senning of The Emily Post Institute. Generally, “gifts should be received with the same spirit of generosity in which they are given,” says Senning. “If you don’t particularly appreciate the gift itself, you are expected to say thank you [them] for the effort or thought that went into it.”
With that in mind, Senning says it’s not a cardinal sin to re-gift something if you know you won’t be able to use it — for example, if you already have the item. But you should avoid regifting anything handmade or personalized. “Beyond that, it’s about being upfront, ethical, honest with the original gift giver, and with the new recipient,” Senning told Vox. After all, a gift should be freely given with no obligation and the recipient has some choice as to what they do with the gift. (This is a reminder to include a gift receipt whenever possible.)
“One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep it forever.”
Even after the etiquette issue is resolved, it can be difficult to decide which gifts you will no longer keep. “It’s usually easier to start with items that have less emotional value,” writes Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach who writes about decluttering your home. unwanted giftstold Vox in an email. Larger items that take up a lot of space can be prime candidates for early decluttering, whether they’re being regifted or donated.
If you have someone in your life who would appreciate a gift, you should Ideally let them know That you have been given things which you cannot use here for insertion-reasons but would prefer to give them away. Clothes — a general But often Miscalculated Gifts — jewelry, and household items can all go to a Goodwill location or local family shelter. Furniture, appliances and other household items can also be donated Habitat for Humanity Recovery program
“One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep it forever,” Landau-Pope says. Take the example of greetings and holiday cards, which can pile up in your drawer or take over your fridge. Landau-Pope’s personal policy is to keep her children’s handmade cards, while displaying others for a period of time, take a photo of the display and then recycle them.
Why do we get so many bad gifts?
In the ideal gift exchange scenario, we probably want to grace the people in our lives with gifts that will be met with undeniable enthusiasm. So why do we often associate with the bad?
That might be an expectation mismatch: “Whenever we’re gift-givers, we’re really focused on making people happy when they’re opening the gift,” explains West Virginia University marketing professor Julian Givey. In other words, we prefer a big reveal play, as opposed to whether the gift is useful and valuable years down the road.
Then there are all the other unintended ways we can give a bad gift. We can overestimate how passionate someone is about a hobby, sports team, or anything else they once casually mentioned. We may miss the mark because we don’t know enough about the other person; We wouldn’t in a million years guess that they have a bad childhood association with getting a hand-knit sweater, for example.
We prefer a big reveal play, as opposed to whether the gift is effective and valuable years down the road.
Unfortunately, research shows that subpar gift giving has more sinister motives than we might think. For one, some people know exactly what a recipient wants — maybe they have a gift registry — but they buy something else because the options presented are personally boring to them, Givey says. Another selfish motivation is his Research Discovered: People tend to choose gifts (like, say, a nice pair of sunglasses) that are better than their own version, possibly to avoid feeling jealous.
As Deborah Cohn, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology, identified Five broad patterns How for bad gifts to happen. The more innocuous side due to ritual and obligation. “You’re going to a party, you’ve got to bring somebody something,” Cohn tells Vox. But you don’t know enough about them or don’t want to expend the mental effort to find out what they really want, so you end up grabbing something irrational.
A more aggressive (but very common) type of bad gift-giving is when the gift is intended to impose a particular identity on the recipient. We’ve all heard the stories of parents who only give their daughters dolls and dresses and their sons Legos and video games. It’s not like these donors don’t understand what their individual children’s real preferences are. It’s that they want to impose their own will on the recipient.
“This actually happened to me,” Cohn said. “Someone gave me a book about a religion I don’t mention.”
Other common bad gift-giving habits stem from pure self-centeredness, such as being picky Headphones for your wife That you want or want to use bragging rights to present the splashiest (read: most expensive) gift at the party. These kinds of gift-giving behaviors aren’t wrong, and they’re not innocent, Kohn asserts. “It’s selfish,” she says. “It thinks more about itself than the recipient, and people can see through that.” Right now, Cohen is working on more research to see if there is a link between habitually giving bad gifts and narcissism.
How to be a good gift-giver
Personal taste in gifts can vary greatly, but there are some broad strokes of what people appreciate. According to GV, sentimental gift — for example, handmade or tied to a memory the two of you share — are often underrated by gift givers. Another finding in Givi’s research is that people appreciate gifts given “out of the blue” as opposed to gifts we receive on birthdays or other special occasions. That it’s not being presented out of any social obligation can emphasize that the thought behind the gift really counts.
Being a good gift-giver also involves imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. It takes conscious effort. You really need to ask yourself what this particular person would want, not what you or some other abstraction of a person would want in the same situation. It probably doesn’t help, then, that there’s still some social awkwardness around being clear about what gifts you’d like to receive and what you’d hate to receive. Maybe to some people, maintaining a regularly updated gift registry is great, but if you’re worried about your pile of unused gifts gathering dust in the closet, surprise gift giving seems like the preferred option. (According to Senning, it’s perfectly fine for gift-givers to ask for some guidance about what gift someone wants.)
Kohn remembers a bad gift he received as a child: his father made a joke about him that each gift box had only one small one, the last one had nothing inside. This inspired him to study what gifts mean and how people communicate through them. He told his mother how the prank made him feel; When Kohn finished his dissertation, his mother gave him another set of boxes, this time filled with chocolate. “I think it was the best gift I ever got because he wanted to take away my pain. That gift was meant to be,” she says.
