Opinion | Is Holiday Gift-Giving Really Worth It?

Not all economists agree. Benjamin Ho, an associate professor of economics at Vassar College, who has studied the role of gifts for building trust, told me that “gifts have a lot of value in society” and that the reason gift-giving and receiving is so challenging is part of the point. “If it was easy to get a gift for people, anyone could do it,” he said. Giving a good gift shows that you know someone well, and it builds trust over time. Receiving a gift may be stressful, too, because reciprocity is part of the process, Ho explained, so we feel we need to repay the present at some point.

There’s another economic concept that may explain why I find it so hard to embrace holiday season gift-buying, Ho said — the concept of diminishing returns. When we buy so many gifts for people who are not close to us, and it’s compulsory rather than motivated by any sort of feeling or desire, the value of the gift drops for the giver as well as the recipient.

Though I appreciated the cold, hard, economic analysis, I felt most moved by the description of gift-giving I heard from Mark Osteen, a professor of English at Loyola University Maryland and the editor of “The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines.” First, he said that many people dislike Christmas gift-giving because the commercial process removes any sacredness around the exchange. “It becomes a drop of water in the sea now, one more purchased item, one more ordinary exchange we have no stake in,” as he put it. Many gifts — like family heirlooms — have significant emotional value that transcends the market, he said.

Osteen also said that “a gift is a story, because you’re telling a story about the person you give it to, and a story of how we know each other.” I identified with that, because my husband’s bad gift-giving and my ungracious reaction has become part of our narrative as a couple, and part of our lore as we created a family.

We of course got to know each other better over the years, including through our failures and successes at buying each other presents. My husband learned that he can buy me wearables only if his choices get sign-off from his very fashionable sister, who has excellent taste and has always done right by me. I learned that the gifts he enjoys most are experiences, not things, so for his recent birthday I arranged for my parents to watch our daughters and booked us a trip upstate for the weekend.

We’ve also come around to the other’s point of view to some extent: I’ve discovered ways to enjoy gift-giving, especially for new babies — and for my own children. Making my tiny tough customers happy by showing them how much I am listening to their interests is a particular delight. My husband can laugh at his past gifts gone awry, and he concedes that a lot of holiday gift-giving can feel phoned-in. And we decided together that we’re not getting each other anything this year. An empty stocking is better than a pair of unfortunate jeggings any day.