How to Choose Holiday Gifts
Buying holiday gifts can be time-consuming. Follow Get-It-Done Guy’s 6 easy tips to make your gifts memorable.
It’s that time of year again: time to show the people around you how much you love them by buying them stuff. Because if money and love aren’t the same thing, I don’t know what is.
We spend our holidays buying for two kinds of people. We give gifts to people we love, and we give gifts to people we feel obligated to give to. In some particularly sadistic workplaces, we are even forced to buy gifts for people we would rather see sacrificed to the crocodile gods.
If you want to work less and do more giving, streamline the unpleasant giving and give your loved ones the kind of gift they’ll remember for a lifetime:
Tip #1: Standardize Your “Gifts of Burden”
For obligatory and mandatory gifts, make your life easy by pre-deciding on several standard gifts for the season. That beautiful cocktail table photography book you saw at the overstock store? You can get 16 copies for $3.19. Go for it. What if your recipients are heartless, evil sociopaths who aren’t fans of Akita puppies? Tough noogies. If they wanted a meaningful present, they should have put more effort into making you happy.
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Tip #2: Give the Gift of Experience
Research has shown that things quickly lose their meaning. Remember that combination toe-scraper, melon baller, screwdriver you thought would change your life? I’ll bet it’s sitting right next to the bicycle-powered action figure of your favorite presidential candidate. The advertising industry spends $130 billion dollars each year promising us that the right things will make life wonderful. Is it working, yet?
Experiences, however, create lasting happiness. When planning your holiday giving, instead of wondering what things you can buy your loved ones, ask what experiences you can offer them instead. I like to give a coupon book, where each coupon is good for an experience.
Tip #3: Give Experiences With Distinction
The coupons are for experiences that are different enough from their daily life that it makes an impression. Take for example The Harrises, the family of red-headed vampires who recently bought the house next door. Vampires stay up at night, so they go to the theater a lot. I won’t give them theater tickets. It won’t be memorable. But I am giving them a coupon for a family paint ball adventure! They compete against a werewolf family for the hand of a beautiful young woman named Bella. (Just her hand, though. They save the rest of her for another competition.) It’s an all night game that starts at twilight. By morning, they’ll have an experience they’ll remember for the rest of their, er, lives.
If you don’t know what kind of experience to get them, try giving them freedom. You can give a coupon good for a weekend of you babysitting the kids while the parents do something exciting. Like get a full night’s sleep for a change. Just remember that when little Max begs for a tattoo, you’re supposed to get the removable kind. Don’t make my mistakes.
Tip #4: Give Travel
The best coupons offer experiences with you! Give your boyfriend, girlfriend, spousal equivalent, or polyamorous family unit a coupon for a day together at the state fair. Or an evening of dinner and board games. Or a trip to the movies. Or rock climbing. Or white-water rafting. As long as it’s together. The gift you’re giving is the gift of companionship.
You could even arrange a reunion weekend with your old gang from college. It doesn’t have to cost very much. You convince everyone to attend and do the arranging, and everyone pitches in to cover costs. After all, how much could you possibly spend on a weekend in Las Vegas?
Tip #5: Give In-Person, One-On-One Experiences
In our modern world of smartphones and communication technology, it seems to me that we’re more disconnected than ever before. Getting someone’s undivided attention is rare. I’m considering a coupon good for an evening with me where I leave my cell phone at home. That way we spend the evening together without even the possibility of distraction. If that sounds like a small thing, I challenge you to try it. Don’t just turn your phone off; leave it at home and go spend time with someone. After 5 or 6 minutes of profuse sweating and other withdrawal symptoms, you’ll have a great time together.
Tip #6: Give Something That Creates an Experience
Experiences don’t always have to be events. You can give someone a thing that creates an experience. For example, give an original piece of artwork and guilt-trip them into hanging it in their foyer. Every time they pass by, they’ll think of you (and wonder how you got so much paint to stick to velvet like that).
I’m giving high-end bath products to some of my loved ones. Again, the trick is to get something distinctive, so the experience stays with them. I’m going for “bath bombs,” fizzing balls of soap that you toss into a bathtub to make bubble bath. I don’t know if they’re memorable enough on their own, so I’ve put a small water-activated toy submarine in the middle of each one. Halfway through the bath, boy, will they get a memorable surprise.
‘Tis the season to be jolly, so make the most of it. Get those enemy gifts out of the way immediately, and make yourself and your truly loved ones jolly by giving them experiences, not things.
I’m Stever Robbins. I work with successful people who want to build exceptional lives by helping them reclaim their time by aligning their commitments behind their top goals and providing accountability to those goals. If you want to know more, visit https://www.SteverRobbins.com.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!