I stopped going to Christmas gatherings because my family wouldn't stop spending what I considered a lot of money on things I didn't ask for, didn't want, and have absolutely no use for. I am not going to let them label me ungrateful when I've made it clear there is nothing I want.
I'm fucking sick of the commercialization of Christmas. I lost my faith a long time ago, and even I'm starting to miss the values it was supposed to represent.
I've managed to get into a nice place where my family (and just about anyone else who knows me) knows if they want to get me something, I accept food, and pretty much only food. It's 1000x better than random junk, and only lasts a week at most. It also goes in reverse; I tend to give gifts of homemade treats personalized to the receiver, so someone who hates sweets doesn't get sweet things.
I've received a lot of expensive junk over the years, but my favourite and most memorable gift is a sandwich.
As a child I managed to convince all my family that my desires were too difficult to understand, so they could just give me cash and I'd sort it out. Its been decades now and they still only give me cash and while its very emotionally void its incredibly effective.
And as such, the pomp and ceremony of it all is skipped, because none of them are gonna make a show about a card with money, and we get back to pure family shit sooner.
When I get cash, I try to make sure to toss a message with a picture of something nice I purchased for myself later on in the year. Like, I bought a new chair, and tossed messages to three family members with a picture, saying "thanks for the birthday gift of a portion of this chair you gave me a bit back, it's really comfy, I appreciate it.", that way they get the pomp and circumstance they might actually want in gift-giving activities, but also, I just get proper cash.
I have the same problem with birthdays. Every year since I graduated college my parents will ask me what I want. I will tell them cash or a gift card. I don't need any more junk. If it is an actual necessity I will go get it myself. They always get mad when I say that.
I keep a "cover" Amazon wishlist full of cheap electronic components around. Family won't buy fifty different things off the list, partially because that many gifts would be weird, partially because they have zero idea as to what they all are. My excuse is I do use the parts, and it's fun explaining what they all do when I open them.
I'm notorious for leaving gifts behind when I leave a Christmas gathering. I'd much rather they buy me nothing, I hate the hassle of finding a use for something, storing more junk in my house, or the trouble of returning it.
I also find 99% of the time when someone gets me something I do want it's the lowest, cheapest, crappiest model possible that falls apart after 5min of use.
Going over that much is how you end up with ungrateful kids with rooms full of shit they will usually leave behind (moving around with a single mother). Put the rest in a hedgefund.
$100 was a high toy budget for millennials, but inflation and increased brand markup will bump that up to $200 today. Regardless of budget, I think it's important that a well-behaved kid gets something they want, and make sure no relatives are stressed over gifts.
I was deliberately excluding long-term purchases like game consoles, but game discs/cartridges slipped my mind. $20-50 games would swiftly eat up that $100 budget. Without nephews or nieces, I don't know what kids want these days. The websites for toysrus, target, and amazon(worst) are much shittier than the 90's/00's catalogs. So, I don't really know if all cool toys have premium price tags, but I remember why I gave up on legos before high-school.
Just sayin' that's what my nephews play. I severely doubt their mom lets them spend anything. She's my sister, and I know her pretty well. That's why it would be an uncle gift.
For young kids $20 is usually fine. Unless you want a house full of trash.
Most of the stuff my kids want is in the $5-10 range, and if they get 2-3 things they are super happy. Plus the grandparents give them 3x the amount of stuff.
Greed or poverty, £100 I'd still a decent amount.
And with the cost of living increases and rampant inflation, judging people for that, particularly when they probably have to spend money on other things like food to actually make Christmas happen is disgusting.
I got more than that at Christmas when I was a kid, but that was about the only time in the year my parents bought me fun things I wanted. There was no every time we go to the store you get something. Outside of Christmas I probably got $50 total on my birthday and got to rent a video game a few times a year and buy a few books.
Still, my family now loves to revolve around presents too much. They have all these rules they don't explicitly define but about money and how much it's supposed to be and the other person has to get the same amount, etc. I've noped out of most of it. I'll give my Mom, my nephews, and my teen cousin something, but it's totally random and specific to them. Mom is kinda broke so hers is just for that, and the kids are the only ones close to me. Sometimes I splurge, sometimes I'm cheap. They'd be fools to count on a specific fixed amount of present from me. Don't give to them in the big "party" to be seen either, it's not about the show of it to me.
I've told the kids before too that I'd much rather actually do something than give them things. Like a couple years ago I hung out with the cousin one night the weekend of his birthday, stayed up all night watching horror movies and playing games with him, went out at like 2am to drive around the empty town and get some junk food. He thought it was the greatest thing ever, and it cost me practically nothing.
Having a birthday on Christmas or even within a week of Christmas were the worst birthdays. No fault to the parents, but that's a bit too much to budget for, over such a small time frame.
Although actually on Christmas is the worst, since you could at least hope for a cake and a decent dinner if it wasn't too close to the same day.
$100 is a very nice gift. The people sending you these threats are obviously middle class people who are offended by the idea of not-luxury-presents on Christmas.
I can count on my hand how many times I got a Christmas present that was over $100. (It was my N64)
I have an annual friends-Christmas where the spending limit is $20, and I've been given a stern lecture when I almost bought a $65 present.
Part of it is Millennials are having fewer kids. When you only have one child its easy to justify buying them tons of toys, and kids toys individually are quite cheap.
Once you have multiple you know that they're going to play with each others stuff, half the things you buy will be destroyed, the other half will go unused, and they'll spend the entire Christmas fighting over the cool box the train set came in.
A hundred is a fair amount, even with inflation. My office's secret santa limit is 30 bucks, Canadian mind you so, like, 15 quid, and while co-workers are not nearly as important as your own kids, that's the upper limit, not lower. Especially for a kid, a hundred quid is a lot of money.
I'm assuming they mean for gifts, of course. If they're some maniacal accountant, and counting room, board, utilities, food, beverage, amortized education expenses, etc into that 100, then yeah, I can see how it might dwindle fast, but in terms of gifting? 100 quid is 2 NICE toys, or 3 decent ones.
Really resonating with the comments in this thread. Ever since I graduated college and got my first real person job, I have more than enough money to buy what I need and even what I want. Anything else, unless someone manages to come up with something I really like that I wasn't aware existed, is just useless consumerism and likely something that will just sit in my closet collecting dust.
This has in turn made giving physical gifts to other adults very difficult for me; I figure anyone else who isn't living paycheck to paycheck might feel similarly. So I kind of just tend towards experiences and time spending now. I'll take my parents out to dinner at a nice restaurant instead of giving something they don't need. Stuff like that.
Also, unwritten rules like "for X occasion, getting a gift around $Y is the norm" can go get fucked. It's all so tiring. My brother asked me once what I was getting my cousin for her wedding and then got irritated when I told him. Nothing fancy, just a check for a lot more money than he expected. The notion that people do this shit to keep up appearances and play the game instead of because they genuinely love the person and want to help them is so foreign to me.
I am single, so no wife and kids to spend on, and my expenses are low. So in my opinion there's nothing wrong with spending some extra money on family members I love, even if it makes some people butthurt that I'm breaking unwritten rules and making them look bad. I wrote my little cousin a fairly large check and wrote a very heartfelt note to her for her graduation party, and hearing separately from both her and her father that she cried while reading it and her telling me I'm like the brother she never had is worth infinitely more to me than some extra money sitting in a bank account.
I'm only in my late 20s, but I feel like I'm becoming a grumpy old man already. Just consistently frustrated that most people can't seem to get their priorities straight and focus on things that really matter.
Arranging a gift truce with everyone giftable in my life has been great.
Not because I'm selfish, but because it takes a ton of stress away not having to figure out what people might want to be gifted (that no one gave to them already). Added bonus: I don't have stuff filling closets and drawers that I don't really want but have to keep because someone might ask "hey, where's that XYZ I gave you?"
Kids are a different story, and 100 GBP equivalent seems extremely generous. I'd rather spread that out over the year in allowance / chore credits and let them buy what they want without pretending in magic chimney divers.
I've always been interested in the idea of "Gift Giving as a Love Language", until I realized that no one I know understands how gifts work.
Gift Giving is actually supposed to be a representation of someone's loving devotion to you, because it shows that they put in a bunch of mental effort to find out what you like, and then got you something that they know you personally would find valuable.
What everyone around me normally does is try and figure out what someone could like, and then buy it the week before the party.
Proper gift giving is way harder and monetary amounts are almost totally irrelevant. To whom you are giving the gift to, and why are far more important than anything else. The used coat off your back to a cold man is far more significant than some expensive trinket.
Personal issues of mine that no one asked for-
I stopped going to Christmas gatherings because my family wouldn't stop spending what I considered a lot of money on things I didn't ask for, didn't want, and have absolutely no use for. I am not going to let them label me ungrateful when I've made it clear there is nothing I want.
I'm fucking sick of the commercialization of Christmas. I lost my faith a long time ago, and even I'm starting to miss the values it was supposed to represent.
I've managed to get into a nice place where my family (and just about anyone else who knows me) knows if they want to get me something, I accept food, and pretty much only food. It's 1000x better than random junk, and only lasts a week at most. It also goes in reverse; I tend to give gifts of homemade treats personalized to the receiver, so someone who hates sweets doesn't get sweet things.
I've received a lot of expensive junk over the years, but my favourite and most memorable gift is a sandwich.
As a child I managed to convince all my family that my desires were too difficult to understand, so they could just give me cash and I'd sort it out. Its been decades now and they still only give me cash and while its very emotionally void its incredibly effective.
And as such, the pomp and ceremony of it all is skipped, because none of them are gonna make a show about a card with money, and we get back to pure family shit sooner.
When I get cash, I try to make sure to toss a message with a picture of something nice I purchased for myself later on in the year. Like, I bought a new chair, and tossed messages to three family members with a picture, saying "thanks for the birthday gift of a portion of this chair you gave me a bit back, it's really comfy, I appreciate it.", that way they get the pomp and circumstance they might actually want in gift-giving activities, but also, I just get proper cash.
I have the same problem with birthdays. Every year since I graduated college my parents will ask me what I want. I will tell them cash or a gift card. I don't need any more junk. If it is an actual necessity I will go get it myself. They always get mad when I say that.
Nnnnoooo you can't just be happy with all the stuff you have nnnnnnnnoooooooo
I keep a "cover" Amazon wishlist full of cheap electronic components around. Family won't buy fifty different things off the list, partially because that many gifts would be weird, partially because they have zero idea as to what they all are. My excuse is I do use the parts, and it's fun explaining what they all do when I open them.
I'm notorious for leaving gifts behind when I leave a Christmas gathering. I'd much rather they buy me nothing, I hate the hassle of finding a use for something, storing more junk in my house, or the trouble of returning it.
I also find 99% of the time when someone gets me something I do want it's the lowest, cheapest, crappiest model possible that falls apart after 5min of use.
Going over that much is how you end up with ungrateful kids with rooms full of shit they will usually leave behind (moving around with a single mother). Put the rest in a hedgefund.
Isn't $100 too high? Maybe I come from a different culture but Christmas isn't an excuse to get whatever the kid wants.
$100 was a high toy budget for millennials, but inflation and increased brand markup will bump that up to $200 today. Regardless of budget, I think it's important that a well-behaved kid gets something they want, and make sure no relatives are stressed over gifts.
The PS2 was all of 300, and that was a big Christmas item.
They also sold it to parents as a DVD player since most of those were 600 dollars.
And in less than a year, everyone would learn what a terrible idea that was.
Why what was wrong with it? Lack of HDMI/HCP?
I don't know what the technical reasons are, but using the PS2 as a DVD player turned out to be a good way to burn out the disc-reading lasers fast.
I was deliberately excluding long-term purchases like game consoles, but game discs/cartridges slipped my mind. $20-50 games would swiftly eat up that $100 budget. Without nephews or nieces, I don't know what kids want these days. The websites for toysrus, target, and amazon(worst) are much shittier than the 90's/00's catalogs. So, I don't really know if all cool toys have premium price tags, but I remember why I gave up on legos before high-school.
Fortnite Epic bucks
I would disown any parent who let their kid put micro-transactions on their wish-list.
Just sayin' that's what my nephews play. I severely doubt their mom lets them spend anything. She's my sister, and I know her pretty well. That's why it would be an uncle gift.
For young kids $20 is usually fine. Unless you want a house full of trash.
Most of the stuff my kids want is in the $5-10 range, and if they get 2-3 things they are super happy. Plus the grandparents give them 3x the amount of stuff.
That's one mortal kombat plus some dlcs
The value of a gift isn't so much in the money spent, but in how much it shows you understand the person receiving it.
Greed or poverty, £100 I'd still a decent amount. And with the cost of living increases and rampant inflation, judging people for that, particularly when they probably have to spend money on other things like food to actually make Christmas happen is disgusting.
I got more than that at Christmas when I was a kid, but that was about the only time in the year my parents bought me fun things I wanted. There was no every time we go to the store you get something. Outside of Christmas I probably got $50 total on my birthday and got to rent a video game a few times a year and buy a few books.
Still, my family now loves to revolve around presents too much. They have all these rules they don't explicitly define but about money and how much it's supposed to be and the other person has to get the same amount, etc. I've noped out of most of it. I'll give my Mom, my nephews, and my teen cousin something, but it's totally random and specific to them. Mom is kinda broke so hers is just for that, and the kids are the only ones close to me. Sometimes I splurge, sometimes I'm cheap. They'd be fools to count on a specific fixed amount of present from me. Don't give to them in the big "party" to be seen either, it's not about the show of it to me.
I've told the kids before too that I'd much rather actually do something than give them things. Like a couple years ago I hung out with the cousin one night the weekend of his birthday, stayed up all night watching horror movies and playing games with him, went out at like 2am to drive around the empty town and get some junk food. He thought it was the greatest thing ever, and it cost me practically nothing.
Pffft. My birthday is Dec 25th. All my presents were "Merry Birthday/Happy Christmas" combo gifts.
And birthday parties were always a non-starter.
Those are the worst because you know that the parents are never going to double-up on presents for birthday, and presents for Christmas.
Having a birthday on Christmas or even within a week of Christmas were the worst birthdays. No fault to the parents, but that's a bit too much to budget for, over such a small time frame.
Although actually on Christmas is the worst, since you could at least hope for a cake and a decent dinner if it wasn't too close to the same day.
Why do people act like getting death threats is an accomplishment?
God forbid anyone not spoil the fuck outta their kids rotten
Why do you think we live in an increasingly narcissist society
$100 is a very nice gift. The people sending you these threats are obviously middle class people who are offended by the idea of not-luxury-presents on Christmas.
I can count on my hand how many times I got a Christmas present that was over $100. (It was my N64)
I have an annual friends-Christmas where the spending limit is $20, and I've been given a stern lecture when I almost bought a $65 present.
Part of it is Millennials are having fewer kids. When you only have one child its easy to justify buying them tons of toys, and kids toys individually are quite cheap.
Once you have multiple you know that they're going to play with each others stuff, half the things you buy will be destroyed, the other half will go unused, and they'll spend the entire Christmas fighting over the cool box the train set came in.
A hundred is a fair amount, even with inflation. My office's secret santa limit is 30 bucks, Canadian mind you so, like, 15 quid, and while co-workers are not nearly as important as your own kids, that's the upper limit, not lower. Especially for a kid, a hundred quid is a lot of money.
I'm assuming they mean for gifts, of course. If they're some maniacal accountant, and counting room, board, utilities, food, beverage, amortized education expenses, etc into that 100, then yeah, I can see how it might dwindle fast, but in terms of gifting? 100 quid is 2 NICE toys, or 3 decent ones.
Really resonating with the comments in this thread. Ever since I graduated college and got my first real person job, I have more than enough money to buy what I need and even what I want. Anything else, unless someone manages to come up with something I really like that I wasn't aware existed, is just useless consumerism and likely something that will just sit in my closet collecting dust.
This has in turn made giving physical gifts to other adults very difficult for me; I figure anyone else who isn't living paycheck to paycheck might feel similarly. So I kind of just tend towards experiences and time spending now. I'll take my parents out to dinner at a nice restaurant instead of giving something they don't need. Stuff like that.
Also, unwritten rules like "for X occasion, getting a gift around $Y is the norm" can go get fucked. It's all so tiring. My brother asked me once what I was getting my cousin for her wedding and then got irritated when I told him. Nothing fancy, just a check for a lot more money than he expected. The notion that people do this shit to keep up appearances and play the game instead of because they genuinely love the person and want to help them is so foreign to me.
I am single, so no wife and kids to spend on, and my expenses are low. So in my opinion there's nothing wrong with spending some extra money on family members I love, even if it makes some people butthurt that I'm breaking unwritten rules and making them look bad. I wrote my little cousin a fairly large check and wrote a very heartfelt note to her for her graduation party, and hearing separately from both her and her father that she cried while reading it and her telling me I'm like the brother she never had is worth infinitely more to me than some extra money sitting in a bank account.
I'm only in my late 20s, but I feel like I'm becoming a grumpy old man already. Just consistently frustrated that most people can't seem to get their priorities straight and focus on things that really matter.
Arranging a gift truce with everyone giftable in my life has been great.
Not because I'm selfish, but because it takes a ton of stress away not having to figure out what people might want to be gifted (that no one gave to them already). Added bonus: I don't have stuff filling closets and drawers that I don't really want but have to keep because someone might ask "hey, where's that XYZ I gave you?"
Kids are a different story, and 100 GBP equivalent seems extremely generous. I'd rather spread that out over the year in allowance / chore credits and let them buy what they want without pretending in magic chimney divers.
I've always been interested in the idea of "Gift Giving as a Love Language", until I realized that no one I know understands how gifts work.
Gift Giving is actually supposed to be a representation of someone's loving devotion to you, because it shows that they put in a bunch of mental effort to find out what you like, and then got you something that they know you personally would find valuable.
What everyone around me normally does is try and figure out what someone could like, and then buy it the week before the party.
Proper gift giving is way harder and monetary amounts are almost totally irrelevant. To whom you are giving the gift to, and why are far more important than anything else. The used coat off your back to a cold man is far more significant than some expensive trinket.