My Favorite Gift
Hot on the heels of the year’s biggest shopping days, the figures are in: Holiday spending is expected to break records this year, with an estimated $143.7 billion in sales just online.
My favorite Christmas is not one when I received a coveted item like Barbie DreamHouse or moon shoes (which I actually never received). Nor is it one when, sizing up my family’s respective piles of presents, I found mine to be the largest.
In fact, there were no gifts to unwrap on my favorite Christmas. Instead of the typical frenzy of flying wrapping paper that morning, we all piled into my parents’ vehicles and journeyed to Orlando for a family visit to Universal Studios and Walt Disney World. Now, every year when the many photos from that 2013 holiday trip pop up on my Facebook Timehop, I can’t help but smile.
Such is the magic of memories, which I realize more and more are the best gifts. Science backs this up. Experiential gifts give us the chance to bond over a shared activity, whether the gift giver is included or not, and imprint us with the emotions associated with the overall experience. That’s something Barbie DreamHouse could never do (though I wouldn’t necessarily discount moon shoes), and even when one desires something very, very badly, the satisfaction of receiving it quickly wanes. There will always be a bigger, newer DreamHouse, but experiences are ours alone.
-Jennifer Bardoner, editor