Gifts of the Season

This time of year tends to be a time when many of us are caught up in the intoxicating consumerism that comes with the holidays.  The popular song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ would force you to spend $27,393 on your true love this year if you used the song as a shopping list (Reuters 2013).  Rest assured that I won’t be doing any finger pointing here, because in the past I have been an active participant during the holiday season partaking in traditional spendthrift tendencies. 

With the plethora of buying and gift giving that occurs, sometimes we can get lost in the hustle and bustle to get the latest and greatest gifts to bring the biggest smiles.  There’s a cliché we are all familiar with that says ‘It’s the thought that counts’.  Now this cliché is usually used in instances where people don’t like their gift, or it’s not what they expected, so they use the saying as a scapegoat.  But what would happen if we lead with that as our premise for gifts for family, friends, coworkers, and our employees?  In reflecting about this I began to think about what types of gifts we might see more of, tangible and intangible, and how gift giving could change.  There were two things that came to mind that I’d like to focus on here, and that I hope to give more of during Christmas this year, as well as in the near future.

Having been a supervisor of employees there is always the dilemma of what to give them as gifts, whether it’s for birthdays, milestone achievements but especially around the holidays.  After a conversation with a former colleague about gifting to employees, I saw how time could be a very important gift in the workplace.  This type of gift makes a lot of sense because time is such a precious entity.  Time is so precious that we have placed value on it by the hour when creating wages.  Therefore why not give time as a gift?  Once those minutes in life have gone by they cannot be replaced, which makes them so precious.  The gift of time can manifest in multiple different ways, but I would suggest that time in the form of a day off would be the most beneficial.  As the conversation progressed, it became very clear that vacation time is seen as a free-time where employees were free to do with it as they choose.  The converse of this, would be time with coworkers or with their supervisor in a non-work environment such as a retreat.  This is beneficial for team building, but when it comes to a gift for an employee whose day is typically structured by the organization they work for, a vacation day is that much more of a precious commodity.   

Gifting time is not only something that is important in the workplace, but also in one’s personal life.  Spending time with those that we love and care about is something that is very important to many of us.  However when you spend time with those that are close to you, it is very much appreciated by those you are spending that time with making it special.  Another form of gifting time in one’s personal life can come via volunteering it to a cause that you are interested in.  Following the idea that time is valuable and precious, using your personal time to share a talent, or help a cause, can be a great gift to that cause.

The second gift I thought of, could have tangible elements to it.  The gift of thanks can be given by a handwritten personal note, which in our age of technology can mean so much more.  If technology is necessary, making it personal instead of a standard thank you goes a very long way.  It may also come in the form of a token of appreciation where something is given that has a lot of thought put into it, but may not necessarily be the most expensive item.  This is a place where the cliché mentioned above ‘it’s the thought that counts’ really plays a significant role, because the cliché is used as the motivation to give rather than an excuse to give just anything.

             During this holiday season I hope to share more gifts like those mentioned here.  It may be too late for Christmas Day or other holiday’s that you might have done some shopping for but maybe you will consider some of the thoughts here when doing your own gift giving in the future. 

In Works Cited Section:

Jenkins, Colleen. (December 2013). Cost of “Twelve Days of Christmas” gifts leaps in 2013. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/02/us-usa-christmas-gifts-idUSBRE9B10O320131202.