Christmas in an alternate 2020
Lovely blog post by Tim Harford. Thanks https://johnnaughton.substack.com/
Perhaps there is no wrong way to exchange Christmas gifts, but in a hurried rendezvous just off junction six of the M40 must come close. My sister was furious; we had planned to go for a walk in the woods together the day before Christmas Eve, one of the safest activities imaginable. No longer: true to form, the prime minister had promised far more than seemed possible, realised it wasn’t possible after all, and then snatched it all away in a tumble of confusion. If the present-swap was to be legal, we had just hours to get it done.
As I drove to the rendezvous, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. For 15 years I’ve been writing columns discussing the problem with Christmas gifts, and now we were testing the idea to destruction. If nothing remained of Christmas except the presents, what would I do? The situation revealed the answer: at almost any cost, I’d hand over the damn presents.
We economists have a troubled relationship with gift exchange…
They do. That’s because they think people are very bad at choosing gifts.
To a brother-in-law who likes cricket, we give a cricket-themed tchotchke whose sole purpose is to symbolise the fact that we know he likes cricket. To a music-lover, we give CDs, not realising that she threw out the CD player years ago and listens only to vinyl. The shirt is lovely but does not fit; the toys would have been cool three years ago; the book is so perfectly chosen that in fact the recipient read it over the summer. Many pitfalls lie in wait even for a gift-giver who has empathy, imagination and patience — and by mid December many of us are running low on all three.
But because gift-giving remotely is one of the few things we have been able to do this Christmas, Harford comes up with an interesting thought-experiment. “The pandemic”, he writes,
has operated like a neutron bomb, destroying the hugs and the feasting and carol services and the visiting of elderly relatives, while allowing the flow of gift-wrapped plastic to continue unabated. What a shame that things aren’t the other way around. Imagine an alternate universe in which Christmas carols and pantomimes and parties and feasts with family and friends were all possible, but because of a strange virus that lived on wrapping paper, it was unsafe, illegal and deeply antisocial to offer Christmas gifts.
Might be worth a try.