Do we want to give something that makes your partner happier or something that makes them happier with you? Photo / Supplied
If you think your gift-giving might not be quite up to scratch this Christmas, don't read this: Ruth Spencer, the greatest gift-giver I've ever met, once gave her sister 30 personalised gifts on her sister's 30th birthday, all of them beginning with the letter "K", the first letter of her sister's name.
For people close to her, she tends to come up with a theme and buy multiple presents around that theme, wrap the presents with theme-co-ordinated paper, put them into a theme-related package or container, and bake theme-related cupcakes to go with them.
Her husband, television everyman-funnyman Te Radar, recently told her, "I still like being asked 'What do you want for your birthday?' and going 'I want one of those things', and then you get me one of those things."
"Do you?" she said. "I hate that. I just think, 'What's the point of it?'"
"It's good," he said, "because I wouldn't have bought it myself. Well, I would have bought it myself but then I don't have to because someone bought it for me."
"I hate that," she said. "I hate it. I hate it. I'm like, 'Just put some thought in.' It doesn't take very much, it's the thought that counts, but that's no thought. It's zero thought."
Radar, by both their admissions, is not so good at giving gifts. He has failed many times. Once, after Spencer bought him a PlayStation for his birthday, he reciprocated on her birthday, eight days later, with an EyeToy camera for that PlayStation.
"We've had better days," he said.
Asked if the gap between his wife's gift-giving talents and his own drives him crazy, Radar said, "Yes, but it should drive me crazy in a way that I try to become a better person from it. It should be a learning experience."
"What he's saying," Spencer said, "is that it has been an absolute drama and a terrible trial to him."
"It does set a lot of expectations," he said.
"No!" she said. "See, that's the thing! I find that so difficult because I don't do it in order to be a burden, I really don't.
He said, "I come from a place where birthdays are things..."
"Or not," she said. "People ignore them."
"They're not a big deal," he said.
"It is a problem though isn't it?" she said.
"It is a problem if you've got different expectations and you've got a different sense of what's important and it is really easy to feel really disappointed if things don't pan out."
"Christmas is harder than birthdays because you have a split focus, trying to buy for lots of people at once. If you have to post, then vouchers are really so much better than anything else. My advice for Christmas is do it early, like all done by October. That way you can do a lot online, even if it's just browsing for ideas, and things just trickle in, no drama," says Spencer. "When you get to December and you already have some gifts sorted you will be so grateful to yourself. It's the gift you give to you! Also then you can focus on really great giftwrap or overspending at the supermarket or binging on fairy lights. It also won't feel so much like your bank account was hacked by criminals."
Christmas is an expensive time of year. If you're an adult, from a family with one or more siblings and you've got a family of your own and you've ever done a budget you've no doubt been shocked - shocked - by the amount you spend on gifts. "How is this possible?" you've probably asked your spouse and self. "We must rein this in!" you've undoubtedly said.
One study in the United States found that people spend more than 4 per cent of their household income on gifts. An economist would assume that this level of spending would suggest we're doing our best to do it right, but that economist would be wrong.
Gift-givers are, according to another US study, "susceptible to egocentrism, social projection, and multiple attribution errors". In other words, they are selfish, confuse their own desires with those of the people they're buying for and have no idea what's going on in the heads of the recipients, who are generally the people they spend most of their time with.
For Radar's birthday this year, Spencer used the theme "past, present, future". For the past, she bought him his family tartan and a working kilt; for the present, because he was turning 45, she bought him a 45 of the Chris Knox record Not Given Lightly and for the future she bought him the new PlayStation game No Man's Sky.
"Themes add an entirely different level to things. Yeah. Themes. It's not just a gift. There can be eight. And they fit to a theme, and they're wrapped to a theme. And sometimes there are cupcakes," says Radar. "That is a lot of stress."
When they first met, the gifts were a delight for Radar. "This is awesome, this is big, this is fantastic," he recalls. "Like, wow! My God. But then, because her birthday is a week and a day after mine, pressure mounts."
"Yes, that's the trouble," she says. "It's a week after."
"The clock starts ticking," he says.
"No!" she interrupts. "See, that's the problem! My clock starts ticking for his September birthday in June, but his clock starts ticking the day after his birthday, which gives him a week. And I'm like, 'No! That's not how this works! You can't do it in a week!'"
If you've ever spent the week or two before Christmas desperately googling "gifts NZ" in the hopes of the internet doing your thinking for you, you've almost certainly landed on the website notsocks.co.nz, an online gift shop set up by Jude Burnside in 2010, which has since become the number one-ranked online gift store in New Zealand.
Burnside, who set her business up because she loves gift-giving, thinks we as a culture have lost some of the magic. "It's become a 'to do', rather than something special."
She says it doesn't have to be a burden, that you can wing it without much time, but that putting in some thought is key. She has some advice: "Think about life stages - new house, baby, travel, leaving home, car, hobbies, retirement, new jobs, past and new interests and passions. And listen to people: do they have something that's getting old and needs replacing? It doesn't have to be a big thing: for instance, is their phone battery stuffed?
"Think about mementos of shared experiences, favourite music you used to listen to, or have just discovered, or books that say something special. It's just taking that little bit of time to have a think about it."
When asked about the best gifts she has given or received, the two she comes up with are tickets she was given to a UB40 concert and a gift she gave her eldest daughter of a weekend away in Queenstown, just the two of them.
She's aware of the irony of this, that she runs a thriving online gift store which sells only physical objects, but her best gifts have been experiences. The irony is even richer when considered in conjunction with the findings of a paper titled "Jewelry and Clothing Only, Please!" from the University of South Carolina, which found that people prefer to buy experiences for themselves but when others are buying for them, they prefer something physical.
Radar has learned, in his relationship with Spencer, that he can't buy presents "on the day".
"You certainly can't buy them at the airport bookshop at the end of a flight on the day," Spencer says.
"It was a good present though," he says.
She replies. "Well, a couple of the books were good, but there was also a book called Scroogenomics, on the economics of why you shouldn't buy presents. He thought it was a joke but it was not very funny."
"It makes a lot of sense as an economic theory," Radar says. "What it says is that you can never buy somebody something worth the value of the money you spend on it, because they will never value it at that dollar rate because if they did, they would have bought it themselves."
Spencer says: "It's actually a really accurate theory, but it takes out of the equation that thought stuff I was talking about before, it takes the being thought of out of the equation."
It's a common sentiment: that a good present is about the thought you put into it and the time you spend thinking about it, but maybe we're doing it wrong.
A recent study from Northeastern University, the University of California, and Washington University found that, given the choice between a Visa giftcard or a giftcard from their favourite store, people mostly just want the credit card.
It all comes down to what you're trying to do with a gift. There is much research into what gifts people prefer to receive or give, but those preferences focus on people's feelings about the gift rather than their feelings about the people giving them.
Researchers from Canada's Simon Fraser University have found that we prefer to both give and receive gifts that reflect our passions and interests but we actually feel closer to our gift-giving partners when the gifts reflect the interests and passions of the giver.
The question becomes: what are you trying to achieve by giving your gift? Do we want to give something that makes them happier or something that makes them happier with you?
Radar repeats he comes from a background where people ask, "'What do you want for Christmas?' And you go, 'I'd quite like a socket set' and for Christmas you get a socket set, and 40 years later I still have the socket set."
"Sometimes, in your family," Spencer says, "you get the money to buy yourself a socket
set."
"And yes, I am happy with that," Radar says.
"Yeah, however, my philosophy is ... "
"My mum's going to read this," Radar says.
"Good," Spencer says. "My philosophy is that Christmas or a birthday is an opportunity to show somebody you care about them and that you have put thought into them ... One of the ways you can do that is ask yourself, not just who I think that person is, but who does that person think he is? If it's a thoughtful gift, it shows them, 'I hear you and I understand you and I pay attention to you.'"
Radar says, "I think, 'Do I have to put it in a box that's wrapped up?'"
A live cook-off featured ox heart, wapiti, wild boar and plenty of edible wildlife.