Have A Creamy Christmas! Thoughtful Last-Minute Gift Ideas Sans Accumulation Of Material Crap

Have a creamy Christmas! My girlfriend and I were playing a game of Wingspan a couple weeks ago, and discussing the War on Christmas. Since a lot of people glare at you if you replace the word “Christmas” with “holiday” in your seasonal greeting, we landed on “Have a creamy Christmas!” as an appropriate replacement for all the standard winter solstice-timed salutations. To which, of course, the dignified response is something along the lines of, “And a crunchy New Year to you, sir!”

But how does one have a creamy Christmas, indeed? Well, there are many aspects to it, most far too complex to go into in a relatively brief column. But really nailing gift-giving is one way to ensure that you have a creamier Christmas than most, and fortunately this topic can be explored relatively succinctly.

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Gift-giving is a needlessly stressful aspect of the holidays. Economic studies on the inefficiency of gift-giving have found that people value items they receive as gifts on average 20 percent less per dollar spent than items we buy for ourselves. Meaning that people are getting a lot of stuff they don’t really want, and that when gift-givers are stressed out about recipients potentially not really liking a gift, those fears are probably well-founded.

You’re not going to throw up your hands though and just eschew holiday gift-giving altogether. That would run contrary to centuries of marketing! All hope for a creamy Christmas is not lost, however. Allow me to humbly suggest a handful of last-minute gift ideas that will lead to a minimal further accumulation of material crap that none of us need or really even want. These gift ideas will also help your friend, colleague, relative, romantic partner, or probation officer get what they truly desire for the holidays: a little more quality time with you.

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A Membership To Your Local Zoo, Science Museum, Or Historical Society

Nonprofits that normally rely on ticket sales for part of their revenue stream need your support more than ever right now, and such things are generally open at this point (albeit, in many cases, with mask mandates). If you do gift a membership, make a plan to go with the recipient to the local attraction though — makes it a lot more enjoyable, and again, an important part of the gift is time with you. I’ve recently had fun with people at these sorts of things myself: tossing marshmallows to hungry, hungry alligators together, expressing disbelief at a bull-horned T-Rex-looking dinosaur to an only marginally interested companion, and mutually peppering expert historians with difficult questions. It’s a bonding experience.

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Food, Whiskey, Or Some Other Consumable, BUT With A Definite Plan To Share Together

There have been a handful of occasions in my life for which a friend has slammed a bottle of liquor down in front of me and said, “This is for you, and we are going to sit here until we have finished every last damned drop.” I am still friends with every single one of these people.

Genetic Testing Kit

I’ve had good luck with 23andMe, but there are other commercially available genetic testing kits out there too. These services make fodder for some great conversations, and with 23andMe anyway, your results are accessible at any time via a handy phone app. This is a particularly good option if you have anti-science or overly paranoid family members on your “nice” list — they’ll be super resistant and squeamish at first, but just guilt them into taking the test since you really thought they’d like it and spent so many of your hard-earned dollars on it, etc. They’ll come around to loving it like they did with Facebook (hopefully to less disastrous effect). They might even learn a thing or two that will broaden their worldview a little.

Use Of Your Skills To Fix Some Persistent Annoyance Around The House

The front steps to my house used to be bare concrete. They looked like shit. Then my father, who knows how to do this professionally, installed outdoor carpet over them as a gift to me. The stairs now look great, and now my little toes don’t get cold when I step out there to get the mail. If you’ve notice something amiss with the dwelling of your prospective recipient, and you actually know how to fix it, doing so will make you a Christmas hero. Just don’t learn on the job for this gift option if you’re not actually sure how to fix whatever the problem is, and announce your gift delicately so you don’t make your loved one feel judged for not fixing their own home as it falls apart around them.

The Priceless Gift Of Not Having To Get You A Gift

Try this on for size:

Look, you and I are both adults, if there’s something we want we can just buy it, and at any rate we both already have more shit than either of us could possibly use in two lifetimes. So how about my gift to you this year is that you don’t have to get me a gift, and I’d appreciate the same thing in return. Sound good? Oh, and I almost forgot, have a very creamy Christmas!

A Book, And Not Just Some Random One, But A Book That You Will Be Able To Talk About

Technically if you buy a physical book, it is a tangible object. But books are pretty small and come in an easily storable rectangular cuboid form that also doubles as good décor. Plus, the real gift is the vicarious experience of reading the contents of the book, and hopefully also the personal experience of talking the book over together (read it yourself first or at least simultaneously read your own copy). Not sure which book to get? Here’s a list of 15 perfectly good options. Or maybe you’d prefer some suggestions from other Above the Law contributors. If you and your prospective recipient are both considering going to law school, for some reason, maybe you even want to read and discuss my book.

There you go, half a dozen great options for assuaging your holiday gift-giving anxiety while minimally contributing to the poisonous materialism of our culture and actually strengthening your relationships. I sincerely hope you found this list useful. More importantly, I wish you and yours a very creamy Christmas, and much crunchiness in the coming New Year!

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

Christmas, Gift-Giving, Gifts, Holidays and Seasons, Jonathan Wolf