Gift Considerations
For those of you not keeping track, Joy got her new job back in late September, and up until December I was working at UPS part-time for tuition reimbursement (that never came through) and health insurance benefits (that did come through several times for Joy) among other things. So in the last quarter of 2005 we were suddenly awash in cash that we were not used to having after living on $10K or less a year for all of college.
So, in late October when it came time to give gifts for birthdays and with Christmas looming on the horizon we started to discuss the whole gift giving thing. Here we were with much more money than we were used to having. We only had one source of debt, which could be handled in roughly one month, and our bills were all planned for with far less income in mind. So we finally had the means to give really cool gifts. We could really splurge and do something fantastic for our friends! This was so exciting. Besides, we are married now, so combining gifts logically meant that gifts should be double what they were before, right?
Well, we did that for a few people, and then we got to thinking about some of the less obvious considerations that go along with being suddenly extra generous.
1. It really is fun to give. Knowing that we could actually afford to give ‘dream gifts’ like an iPod or generous gift certificates to iTunes, Best Buy, clothiers, etc. was really exciting.
2a. One of us felt like we should try to give equivalent gifts. There was this feeling that it would be unfair to give one person an iPod, another person a DVD player, another person a new set of tires that she needed, and another person a $50 gift certificate to iTunes, etc.
2b. One of us felt like we should give generously and match gifts to needs and dreams. Most of our friends don’t have iPods, but one does, but she could probably use a nice jewelry box for her jewelry or maybe a external hard drive to safely store all of her new purchased songs. Equality doesn’t need to be determined by cost or value, and furthermore why do we need to try to make everything equal? People aren’t really equal. Some people have more needs or more desires than others.
3. Once this equality consideration came up, it was mentioned that giving extra generously could cause other problems. Most people like to give a gift that is comparable to the gift that they got. Otherwise they “feel like a butthead” (I got that miniquote from my in-laws this Christmas.) So, giving generously can force people into a weird position that we don’t want to impose on people at all. Suddenly they have this iPod or whatever it is and they are thinking “Oh crap, I didn’t get them a gift.” or “Man, I only got them a such’n’such. Now what do I do?” or worse yet we have pressured fellow college students who are on a budget to spend about month’s worth of food on getting a comparable gift for us.
4a. When we first talked about this, one comment was made that it would get pretty expensive to get all of our friends gifts in the $50-$100 range instead of the typical $20 range or the college-budget norm of $5-$15 range. We’ve got quite a few friends (and hope to make more all the time) so $100 multiplied by a few dozen gets into the thousands of dollars.
4b. A counter point was brought up though. We spend money on stuff here and there to make us happy, keep us entertained, improve our quality of life, and so on, but none of these things that we buy or services that we pay for are nearly as valuable as any one of our friends. In fact, if we compared what we received from being friends with our people to the yearly cost of other entertaining, edifying, and pacifying things we spend money on… friends would be worth far more than a few generous gifts here and there.
So, we were pretty much at a standstill with all of this. We’ve given it a lot of thought, and we’d like extra opinions. Also, I would really like to magically know what everyone truly thought about all this. I suppose I will just ask, but y’know what I mean…
Oh, and… you might be wondering what we did about all this between October and now. You might be thinking… Christmas and a few birthdays fall in between those dates. Well, you’d be right! So here’s what we did. We decided to start off with the usual. Do what we have normally done. Yep, that’s right. We played it safe for Christmas. We’re taking risks on birthdays with the big stuff, but playing it safe on Christmas. Why?
Well, even though we were making more money things changed and we had a lot of uncertainty. Also, it seemed like a comprimise between being fair and even and splurging in a big way. Besides, it is so much easier to make someone feel really valued (which is the whole point of all of this in the first place) on their birthday when it is just their day, then on Christmas. Oh, and birthday gifts seem to eliminate some of the comparison problems because Joy and I don’t have birthdays near most of our friends (except me and Jenn, of course) and our friends birthdays are pretty well spaced out from each other.
Posted by David under Reflections |