Why do we give Christmas Gifts?
A friend posed this question to me today, and my first response was something along the lines of because the three wise men gave gifts to Christ, along with so many others. But then it occured to me that the church would hardly condone gift giving for a reason that seems to compare the gift reciever to Jesus himself. And after dwelling on it, I couldn’t think of an answer…
Hmmm…apparently because the Romans exchanged gifts to honor Saturn, one of their gods.
Once again, you can’t simply assume a simple, direct connection between present-day practice and ancient usage. Notions of gift-giving in pre-industrial society were/are very different, not least because they were rarely confined to particular days of the year. Linking the ‘tradition’ to any one religion misses the point - the practice was near universal because it was always the most convenient way to express respect, honour, status and hospitality in an agricultural society. See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Gift in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2000), for a sense of how diverse the practice could be in one early-modern society.
Moreover, in the case of Christmas, any superficial link with any particular pre-Christian festival is undermined by the fact throughout much of Christian Europe the day most associated with gift-giving wasn’t 25 December, but 1 January (as in the British Isles) or 6 January. This is still the case in many European countries.
I’ not sure what you mean by 1st january gift giving in the British Isles.
Christmas wasn’t much celebrated before Victorian times. The two important festivals were advent weeks and Epiphiny. I believe some small-gift giving occurred on 6th January.
Hogmonay, a non-christian festival is celebrated in Scotland and is to do with the turn of the year and renewal- similar to other pre-christian festivals such as Yule. This involves cleaning your house and sorting your life in preparation for the next year. In my experience, Scots give presents at Christmas and merely celebrate (often with a little alcohol) at Hogmonay.
I did learn when doing nursing schedules to think twice before arranging for Scots to work Jan 1st- not out of compassion, but out of wishing to have staff available and wishing to work! I also learnt not to schedule Irish staff for Cheltenham Festival week (a horse race festival held in Britain but celebrated by the Irish.) The English and Welsh just spread their unreliability over the whole year. 
This comes up every year, which is kind of nice.
Won’t be long before someone asks why it’s on dec 25th rather than Jan 1st.
The 1 January was the usual day on which gifts were exchanged at court and elsewhere until the nineteenth century.
Ok, so gifts were actually either exchanged on the first or sixth of January, not on Dec. 25th. For some reason, at some point, we decided to exchange them on the 25th. Interesting in itself.
Question still remains of why we exchange gifts at all, regardless of what day we do it on. Seems that the general consensus is that we do this not because of just one religion, but many different cultures that did this, in order to honor one god or another? So this was just a common thing to do when celebrating ones deity?
joe, not everyone I know exchanges gifts.
Good call, you catch me on a technicality. So alter the question to fit your own situation. For example, I ask, “Why is it that I exchange gifts with the few people who can actually tolerate me, and whose company I enjoy?”