Holiday Gift Giving In This Economy

Yesterday, I received an advanced copy of the ethics column that is expected to appear on BusinessWeek.com’s Web site sometime today. It was written by Bruce Weinstein, and it looks at holiday gift giving in today’s economy.

I know we’re scaling back a bit in the gift department this year. We’re still giving holiday gifts to family and close friends, but they aren’t as expensive as they have been in the past. And, according to Weinstein, “The Ethics Guy,” there’s nothing wrong with that:

There are lots of ways to say “thank you” or “I value our relationship” to someone besides spending money.  How about spending time with someone? Making a small donation in their name? Writing–and I mean really writing, by hand–a heartfelt letter?

You have no reason to feel guilty for not giving holiday presents during our financially shaky times. Sure, traditional presents are great to give, if you can afford to. If not, it’s smart to avoid making a bad situation worse.  We can always be generous of spirit, even when our revenue streams have slowed to a trickle—or stopped flowing altogether.  (By the same token, of course, we should be understanding if we don’t receive the gift certificates or boxes of goodies we usually get from friends and colleagues.)

Return to holiday gift giving of days of yore?

I’ve been reading some literature from Britain and the U.S. (I’m talking 1500s to early 1900s), and I’ve been interested in the types of gifts that were exchanged. Most of them were hand-made to a certain degree and were more along the lines of thoughtful tokens of esteem rather than expensive expressions of consumerism. Perhaps we should take the lesson here:

It’s the thought that counts.

Sure, we’ve heard it. But in our consumer culture we haven’t really paid much attention to the thought — we’ve been too concerned about whether the price tag is sufficiently large. But perhaps now we can start thinking about the feeling behind the gifts.

What are your gift ideas in this economy?