Gift Service Exchanges Online Gifts

Santa's little helper writes "According to this story on New Scientist, it will soon be possible to exchange unwanted Christmas gifts before they are even shipped." I just find this amusing, my favorite part is the line 'instead of unwrapping presents, we might take turns logging on to a computer'. Click here for merry christmas.

Comments

returned gifts? online wishlists helped

[raulmazda]

The concept of the article seems like a weird way of solving the problem to me.

I have a big family (I'm 1 of 8 kids), and we do a gift exchange thing every xmas. We ran into troubles with duplicate gifts being given and slightly wrong gifts ("I wanted a small red one but you bought a big blue one instead").

So last year I hacked together some php to maintain online wishlists for everybody. Each person gets an account and maintains their own wishlist. Other people can check off items from their list to mark them as being purchased (eliminates the dupe gift problem). You can't see what's checked off on your own list, but everyone else can.

It worked out well last year, I hacked it a little more this year, and have plans for a better wishlist system next year (generic event wishlists plus some other nice frills).

(There's also giftweb at sourceforge which I originally looked at (and sent a patch), but later scrapped it as I was too far along on my own hackish solution.)

Bah Humbug

[CyberGarp]

Xmas has it's origin the great Yule feast of the Norsemen and Roman Saturnalia. It didn't have anything to do with gift giving until the Victorians got ahold of it. It wasn't really until 1890 that Santa Claus got twisted into the tool of unbridled consumerism that he is today. The majority of current Xmas traditions are less than 100 years old.

What's wrong with all the giving? I like to give presents to people who need them or are particularly suited to them. So now once a year I'm supposed to go out and do it for everyone I know all at once. A near impossible feat to do.

This summer I was eating steak at my Uncle's house. He didn't have a decent steak knife in his house. I went out and bought him a set of steak knives that day. Xmas rolls around, and I don't know what he needs and I haven't seen anything that suits his character, but I'm coerced by a capitalist society to go and do the american thing and "buy" him something.

Point is I buy my friends and family things all through the year, when I see the need or find something particularly suited to them. Should I hoarde it till Xmas? Odds are my Uncle would have gone and bought some steak knifes before Xmas or he wouldn't have got to use the ones I got him for 6 months.

Also about half the stuff I get is worthless to me and of no value but the occupation of space. What's the point in that? Objects that don't work as advertised that people bought in haste to complete some ritual developed by industrial marketing.

Same for Xmas cards. If you don't have time to write me a letter, don't bother. In eastern Europe it's considered insulting to send a card that's just signed without a long letter. Let's people know how little you think of them. A bunch of cards with signatures is interesting decoration, but worthless to me in terms of contact. More fodder for the card industry.

I moved recently and inventoried everything I own. Many items I still hang onto as momentos of old friendships and times long gone. Almost none of those items with sentimental attachment came at Xmas.

It's fun as a kid to get a bunch of toys under a tree and I have nothing against this whole Santa Claus thing for a bit of play and fun. But as adults, this exhange before receipt is just another wake up call to the bogusness of this holiday tradition of "giving."

Xmas is about having a big feast with your family and recapping the year. You get to watch children get overstimulated by too much excitement and toys.

P.S. Xmas was considered so pagan that it didn't become a legal holiday in the U.S. until 1836. In the 1600's armies were sent around to pull down the pagan Xmas trees.

Pawn shops etc

[freeweed]

Go visit your local pawn shop, and ESPECIALLY places that deal in used video games, during the last week of December. Stores get absolutely flooded with stuff. Hell, one year I saw a kid selling 10 unopened SNES games that he received for xmas. He got all of 1/3 retail for them. I'm sure his aunts/grandmas/parents/etc would have been happy to know that 2/3 of their money went in the toilet.

Having said that, for those of us who hate paying full price for anything, the weeks immediately after xmas are a goldmine! Now am I part of the problem or what... :)