A “special advertising section” of the Star Ledger Tue 12/16 had an article titled Gift card has redeeming value written by ‘Andrea Frucci – Marketing Staff.’ Ms. Frucci tries to paint the gift card as a win-win situation for people looking to buy gifts, less work for you, and then your recipients get to go out and pick their own gifts.
When did the “Holiday Spirit” of gift giving annually described in seasonal readings of “The Gift of the Magi” become so quickly translated into an economic competition of outdoing ourselves with greater and greater transfers of funds?
Every year the pressure seems to mount to pick up big ticket items, make sure to grab your gift receipt, and people are forced to worry about giving a large enough present. The last minute stress of discovering that a friend or family member’s gift cost significantly more than yours leads us on frantic last minute buying sprees trying to match the “generosity.”
Even worse though seems to be the proliferation of gift cards and registries, which suck all the spirit of thoughtfulness and spontaneity out of the process. What happened to the ideal of someone who knew you well thinking carefully of something they could get or do for you, working to match a gift to your personality. Or the idea of getting someone something they ordinarily wouldn’t get themselves? Clicking on an item in an Amazon wishlist doesn’t feel to me to have the same connection and sentimentality as the thoughtful or even offbeat gifts selected by someone who knows you better than you often know yourself.
To be honest, I sometimes feel like a gift card shifts the last burden of gift giving onto the received. While perhaps a nice gesture from a student for a teacher, or in some other circumstance where you don’t know them well, to give restricted cash to an immediate family member or close friend? You can’t even go to the supermarket now without being prompted to give someone the “gift of groceries.”
While options are good, and I would be the last to advocate restricting choice, I know that I personally value gift more for the spirit and thoughtfulness than the sticker price. The gifts I’ll most treasure aren’t the expensive ones, or the items I selected for myself, but rather the unexpected but wonderful items by those who spent their time looking with me in their thoughts and hearts.
Gift Cards Have Redeeming Value?
Tags: about · ANT · cas · ci · cle · HTML · irc · it · Personal · tar · ui · Work
A “special advertising section” of the Star Ledger Tue 12/16 had an article titled Gift card has redeeming value written by ‘Andrea Frucci – Marketing Staff.’ Ms. Frucci tries to paint the gift card as a win-win situation for people looking to buy gifts, less work for you, and then your recipients get to go out and pick their own gifts.
When did the “Holiday Spirit” of gift giving annually described in seasonal readings of “The Gift of the Magi” become so quickly translated into an economic competition of outdoing ourselves with greater and greater transfers of funds?
Every year the pressure seems to mount to pick up big ticket items, make sure to grab your gift receipt, and people are forced to worry about giving a large enough present. The last minute stress of discovering that a friend or family member’s gift cost significantly more than yours leads us on frantic last minute buying sprees trying to match the “generosity.”
Even worse though seems to be the proliferation of gift cards and registries, which suck all the spirit of thoughtfulness and spontaneity out of the process. What happened to the ideal of someone who knew you well thinking carefully of something they could get or do for you, working to match a gift to your personality. Or the idea of getting someone something they ordinarily wouldn’t get themselves? Clicking on an item in an Amazon wishlist doesn’t feel to me to have the same connection and sentimentality as the thoughtful or even offbeat gifts selected by someone who knows you better than you often know yourself.
To be honest, I sometimes feel like a gift card shifts the last burden of gift giving onto the received. While perhaps a nice gesture from a student for a teacher, or in some other circumstance where you don’t know them well, to give restricted cash to an immediate family member or close friend? You can’t even go to the supermarket now without being prompted to give someone the “gift of groceries.”
While options are good, and I would be the last to advocate restricting choice, I know that I personally value gift more for the spirit and thoughtfulness than the sticker price. The gifts I’ll most treasure aren’t the expensive ones, or the items I selected for myself, but rather the unexpected but wonderful items by those who spent their time looking with me in their thoughts and hearts.