Do you do the thing where you just leave it somewhere in the house for the other to find? I love that. I’ll get a Skype at work “what’s this in the dining room table?” Open it and see. Much more meaningful to us.
Visit a local care agency for say domestic abuse survivors or rehab, vets, or whatever trips your interests. See what they need. Send list to mom and sis. Let them shop for 15 cases of various sized disposable diapers, 47 preschooler outfits or 30 travel pack oral hygiene packages along with assorted other toiletries. Tell them that is what you really want the most. Thank, take, and deliver. Tell them whatever you receive will go to the selected agency or another that could better use what you get. No false pretenses, no throwing something in the closet for 6 months before you regift it.
My family is still in the gift-giving business. I have 3 sisters - 3 of us are married with kids. I also have grandkids. And we still have our mom. For years everyone would buy for everybody, but as the family grew it became too expensive. We still enjoy gift-giving and receiving, so for the last 20+ years we draw names. Everyone makes a wish list and puts it in an envelope and then we draw envelopes. It makes shopping so much easier and we get what we need/want. This includes kids. So instead of each of us buying 20 gifts, we each have an adult and a kid to buy for. We finally talked our mom into getting in on the drawing. She was still buying for everyone and everyone would get her something too.
As of now, everyone is happy with this plan and it works. I’m sure it will morph into something else as kids grow up.
My wife and I gave it up a few years ago, too. It came in steps. First I opted out of gift exchange with my snarky sister-in-law and my brother, her husband. That left my wife and I and my parents. After a couple more years, we decided to stop gift giving to each other. We’re lucky enough to be able to afford to buy what we want when we want it, and the gift exchange just felt like outsourcing our shopping to one another and delaying it until Christmas day.
I have to admit, I do miss a bit the fun of present opening on the morning of the 25th, but that’s a small thing and it’s overall been very positive. The stress of Christmas is very low now. We still put a few treats in each other’s stockings from Santa, and give gifts to our young niece and nephew.
Highly recommend, will do again this year!
There’s a bunch of online ways to do the Secret Santa thing now if getting everyone together to draw envelopes before Christmas is difficult.
I remember a couple of early Christmases at my wife’s family. 10-12 people each buying a present for everyone. That’s a 100+ damn presents to open! So glad we stopped the insanity.
If you hadn’t, I would’ve started the same thread.
I exchange no gifts with anyone for Christmas. The last holdouts were my parents who for years insisted that they buy me a gift. I finally broke them last year. Now… I’m free. (Exception… kids. I spoil my niece and nephew who are both under 10… because that’s what uncles do. :D)
I still enjoy the season, and everything else it has to offer… I just don’t like being told what to do with my money. If you think about it, every month we’re expected to open our wallets for some bullshit holiday or event. It’s just one method by which the commies keep the masses broke and dependent.
That’s a very peculiar definition of “communism.”
Started a thread about wish lists so that I wouldn’t derail this one.
Yes. And “meaningful” is the perfect word.
I married into a family that does Yankee Swap for the adults at an annual Christmas party. Everybody buys one $10-20 gift and wraps it. All the gifts are piled on a table and the adults sit in a circle. The first person chooses a gift and unwraps it. They can either keep it, or put it back on the table. The next person can choose a wrapped present, or take the present from the first person, or from the table if it was returned. This continues around the room, until all the presents are gone and everybody has one. Nobody knows what they will end up with until the very end. Some people buy gag gifts like a Chia pet, others buy cool stuff that everybody wants. One year we did a theme of “As Seen On TV” gifts like the pocket hose or the Snuggy. It is a fun inexpensive way to do gift giving for adults.
During the Great Depression, my great-grandfather gave his son-in-law a crisp new $2 bill for Christmas every year. The son-in-law likewise gave him a (different) crisp new $2 bill for Christmas every year. A perfectly elegant solution, IMHO. Sadly, my extended family isn’t crazy about resurrecting the idea.
The best gifts for adults are something a little indulgent that the recipient would actually use and enjoy but might feel a bit guilty about buying for themselves. Trouble is I usually can’t think of something like that for most of the people on my list.
I have yet to see the Yankee Swap / White Elephant game played without the (usually) Unspoken Final Turn rule: after all of the presents have been opened, players may make deals and/or hold grudges against people who took the present they really wanted from them. This goes on for as long as people can hold grudges.
As for the OP, do what I do: buy your own gifts (“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” as Louisa May Alcott put it), then say that Gift A is from Person X, Gift B is from Person Y, and so on, and have Persons X and Y say that one of their gifts is “from you.” No worries about getting the “wrong” gift for someone.
Where I live now, there are a lot of local entrepreneurs. People make jams and jellies, honey, genuine maple syrup, and candles, and sell them at open-air markets and the like, or out of their homes. There’s a guy who makes soaps, lotions and bath bombs that are better than what they have at Bath and Body Works! So Mr. Rilch and I stock up on these items, some for ourselves, some to give as gifts. People are always appreciative, because it’s better quality than they can get at the mall or drugstore.
I’ve somehow never forgotten a thread from years ago where the OP said “I’m so broke, so lonely, I’m not exchanging gifts with anyone because I don’t know anyone here, and my parents have decided to buy Christmas presents only for my brothers’ kids. I wouldn’t mind, except I’m single and lonely and can’t even afford stuff I need, like food.”
Most people were sympathetic, but a few posters really rubbed her face in it. “But you are getting a gift! You’re getting the privilege of watching other people’s kids open lots and lots of pricey prezzies! If your parents gave you a Christmas present, that would be treating you like a baby.” And when others dared to suggest that a ten-dollar gift card would mean a lot to someone who’s down on her luck, “What?! That wouldn’t make a kid happy! If her parents spend ten dollars on her, that’s like taking food out a baby’s mouth! She needs to grow up and stop being immature and materialistic! Probably that’s why her parents are doing this – to teach her a lesson!”
Since then, I’ve prioritized single friends/family, and people who I know are struggling, over people with spouses/families, or who are (AFAIK) financially stable. I don’t count the cost*, but I’m conscious of the possibility that a Starbucks gift card or box of homemade cookies might be not just welcome, but needed.
*One guy in that thread would not cede his point that $50 was nowhere near enough to spend on even one kid, and pre-schoolers needed at least twice that spent on each of them. At the same time, he claimed that a $10 gift to an adult couldn’t possibly be anything worth having. This from someone who probably owned his house and made six figures a year; I mean, he had to be well-off if he thought $50 was chump change. I really should have pitted him.
Oh yea - we had the same thing years back. There were so many presents, it took us until midnight to open everything. CRAZY! So drawing lists works great for us now. We usually do it at Thanksgiving. If someone isn’t there, we draw for them.
I guess I was lucky growing up in a Jewish family that never got into the Christmas thing. When we were kids we got small gifts, but adults never exchanged gifts. (Later on, they pretended the gifts for kids were for Hanukah, but no one was fooled by that.) When our kids were young, we gave them gifts. Then they grew up and went off and we stopped. Then we would give our grandchildren small gifts and we still do for the younger ones, but three of the six are college age or beyond and we stopped.
My sister married into an Italian family and they were obligated to exchange large gifts. She told that they had, absolutely had, to give her MIL a gift worth at least $500 and get a similar gift in return. And the same with her BIL. And their kids, I suppose. It means that all (or a great part) of your luxury shopping is done by others who have to guess what you want. And you have to agonize over what to get them. No thanks.
I enjoy exchanging gifts with my family and some friends. I like to hear ideas from them about what they’d enjoy, and fulfilling them. My family tends more toward services at this point–massage, pedicure, hotel, or restaurant–than stuff. It’s still fun to surprise people with earrings or a book, and I enjoy this in return. Yes, we could just spend the same amount on ourselves, but I probably wouldn’t. When my family contributes to my vacation fund, I send them postcards or photos of “their contribution,” such as a nicer hotel, an interesting meal, or a puffin-watching excursion. This is gratifying all around.
I don’t know, at a certain point (or age?) I think the gift is that you’re giving (or accepting) a gift in the first place. My mother, in her 70’s, LOVES Christmas. And she cares a lot more about quantity than about quality. We may not get anything we want (or we get the cheapest version of what we asked for, or we get the completely wrong version of what we asked for, such as the year I got The Stranger by Camus rather than The Stranger by Van Allsburg - and I’d written the author on my “list.” And I’d been collecting children’s literature for decades). But to her it’s all about lots of presents under the tree. I can’t even imagine how sad she’d be if I suggested we stop giving altogether. Worse comes to worst, I hate it, I tell her I love it, and I donate it to Goodwill.
Apologies if this already came up, but I’ve been evading an awkward family gift situation by offering to make donations to favorite charities. I don’t have to shop, some are too lazy to even take me up on the offer, good causes are helped, and I get the tax benefit 
Being Jewish I never did Christmas either until I was married, and then we did it the way my wife’s family does it. Presents come from everyone. This allows you to coordinate presents and to let the person who can most easily get the present get it. Naturally you tend to buy presents for those closest to you whose needs you know, but there is no toting up the number of presents anyone gets or gives.
We also have done a post-Christmas spending division, so that spending is more or less equal, or rather based on ability to pay.
We like quantity also, and thrift shop presents or even regifting of freebies is quite okay.
Both my sons-in-law would rather do Christmas our way than the way they grew up with, so it seems to work. The best presents are the ones the recipient never knew existed. Two years ago we gave my daughter a game based on the work of a professor well known in her field, which we found by chance in the mall in San Jose. That was a real winner.
This year my grandson will definitely be getting most of the presents.
IMHO, a gift that doesn’t come from the heart is no gift at all. I stopped giving Christmas and birthday gifts years ago because I realized I was doing it out of a sense of obligation rather than caring. For those I care for, during those events, I tell them I won’t give them a gift on that day, but I’ll continue to do things for them (both monetary and non-monetary) throughout the year. If they give me a gift, I’d gratefully accept and thank them for it, but don’t reciprocate a a gift, hoping they understand that I’ll continually ‘gift’ them with love and caring. They usually stop the gift-giving in a year to two.
If someone tells ahead of time that they insist on giving me a gift, despite my having told them I wouldn’t reciprocate, I’d tell them the thought is gift enough and to either spend the money on themselves, someone else or give it to charity. Since your mom and sister enjoy shopping, you might suggest they shop for something practical, but thoughtful and donate to a charity or family in need. In Hawaii we have the Lokahi (unity, harmony) Tree where needy families list their Christmas wishes, which are usually gifts for the children, but sometimes for essentials like clothing and personal health goods.
If I were to use the money I would have spent on individual gifts on charity, I wouldn’t disclose the amount given or charity name (too easy to give to cause that may not be in line with the person’s personal choice) and suggest they could do the same if they would like to