Fu*k Santa

Christmas presents are causing more harm than good

Most of us dislike shopping for gifts.
Most of us dislike receiving gifts we never even wanted.
Yet every year, we’re stuck having to deal with the bullsh*t tradition.
In addition to wasting tons of money, it leaves our homes cluttered with crap we never even asked for.

Economists hate gift giving because of a concept called, dead weight loss. This is the gap between how much a gift giver spends on a present and how much the recipient values the gift. e.g. your sister buys you a $100 dollar sweater but it’s only worth $10 to you. The deadweight loss is $90.

It’s hard to opt-out of this tradition because you don’t want to be the one family member or friend who shows up empty handed at Christmas this year.

My client and her extended family came up with a creative solution to all this wasted spending.
Each family member chooses one present for themselves worth up to $100.
Then a separate family member will be assigned to go out and buy that gift for them.
So, every family member only has to buy one present.
And everyone receives the exact present they wanted.

The icing on the cake is that one of the cousins is a tree hugger. So he and his kids decorated a bunch of cotton sacks of various sizes and the entire family reuses them every year as a substitute for wrapping paper.

If you have a hack for mitigating or escaping this money draining tradition, I’d love to hear it.