Christmas Gift Exchange Ideas

People nowadays are looking for original or nontraditional Christmas gift exchange ideas. Are holiday gift exchange ideas really necessary? In the old days, people simply swapped gifts, and everything seemed to go just find.

On the other hand, looking back, it does seem only natural to wish that I had come up with some original Christmas gift exchange ideas for my dearly departed mother ( born 4/04/16, passed away 10/27/04) and her three Golden Girl sisters (still with us).

Aunt Mary Claire, Aunt Jane and my mother used to give each other money. For example, Mary Claire would give Jane $40, and Jane would give my mother $40, and my mother would give Mary Claire $40, and so on, until the cycle was completed. Somehow, it seemed that $40 was the order of the day, but it could have been $4 or $40,000, whatever, because in the end they all broke even.

(On second thought, it couldn't have been $40,000 or even $4,000 or $400. My family is definitely middle class. At any rate, this was hardly a stellar example of Christmas gift exchange ideas.)

Meanwhile, Aunt Pat always has had something sort of like a wedding gift registry. She makes a list of her gift desires, and then suggests a single item to each prospective gift-giver, to avoid duplication. Of course, this doesn't matter to me, because I always ignore her list and give her one of those scented bath soap and body wash boxes with doily included, accompanied by a giant Cadbury bar with almonds. Still, again, we can do better than sweet ol' Aunt Pat with our Christmas gift exchange ideas.

With that, here are my Top Five holiday gift exchange ideas, some of which won't exactly please Wall Street, but hey, times are tough:

(1) Pick a specific category for gift-giving. For guys, it might be sports. For gals, it might be shoes. (Pow pow pow, awww, sorry to all the females, I didn't mean to be sexist.)

(2) Does our gift-giving buddy, like us, also have kids and/or grandkids? Instead of entering holiday gift exchanges with one another, we pick offspring of similar ages, and give them maybe $20 apiece to buy gifts for one another.

(3) Exchange books. Phil Jackson, coach of the NBA champion L.A. Lakers and co-star of current T-Mobile commercials, is known for giving various topical books to his various players. The choice of a book says a great deal about how we perceive our friends, and about how they perceive us.

(4) Better yet, rather than exchanging books with a traditional gift-giving friend, agree instead to write 300 words about one another. But if we're famous then we must agree, at the same time, not to send these words to the scandal tabloids for public gossip purposes.

(5) With the money we save by not exchanging cash gifts, such as in Item Four, we can shake hands with a friend and pool our cash for a family in need. Can there be a better Christmas holiday gift exchange idea than that?

SOURCES

Personal experience