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Regifting – do you do it? how do you do it?

Posted by on Thursday 23 September 2010 in anti-consumerism, frugal | 3 comments

The other day, a friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that may become more apparent later, told me he had spent part of his weekend wrapping Christmas presents. I pulled a WTF face – wrapping Christmas presents? in September?!

re-gift

He explained that whenever they have to go to the faff of getting the paper, tags, tape etc out to wrap one present, like a birthday present, they wrap a whole bunch of them at the same time to be more efficient. He added that they also have a cunning present recycling strategy.

Whenever the friend and his lady are given birthday/Christmas/random presents they don’t want, they stick a post-it note on it and add it to their to-give present box so it can be regifted in the future without any chance of it ending up back with the original giver.

As I’ve explained before on Recycle This, I’d much rather not get the gifts in the first place and unlike my super nice friend, I’d rather make things a bit awkward than accept the items because I’m uppity and mardy like that – but I think the post-its are a great, simple idea to avoid re-gifting embarrassment.

Do you regift? Or otherwise give gifts of things you already have around your home? Do you have any strategies to avoid giving them back to the giver?

If you’d never regift, why not? How would you feel if you were given something you suspected had been re-gifted? Would you say anything?

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Birthdays – how do you do it?

Posted by on Wednesday 21 July 2010 in anti-consumerism | 2 comments

Yesterday was my birthday – the big 3-1.

birthday-cake

In general, I dislike special days that have been hijacked to become days of mass consumption – I don’t celebrate Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s day, anniversaries or anything like that, but a few years ago, when I worked six days a week, every week, all year, I decided that I’d start celebrating my birthday again as an excuse to have a very rare day off work. I actively discourage cards & presents (cards & for-the-sake-of-it presents really annoy me!) but for the last couple of years, I’ve tried to spend my birthday doing fun stuff: a day off work to try something – a craft, a skill – I’ve not done before. Last year, it was cheesemaking; this year was supposed to be cold smoking but the supplies didn’t arrive and the weather was a bit too moist, so it was more cheesemaking but will be smoking stuff today (if the items arrive in the post or at the weekend – postponed birthday fun stuff).

John pretty much ignores his birthday but if his mum asks what he’d like for a present or if he’d like to go out for a meal, he asks her to cook one of his favourite meals instead. Big family meals out are compromise and too distracted/busy to actually talk to people – he’d prefer to spend the time more comfortably in their family home.

I know other frugal people who ask for gift vouchers etc for their birthday so they can buy what they want with it and/or spread the gift out by having little luxuries over a longer period.

As for giving, I much prefer to give presents throughout the year – when I see an item that I think the person will like, I get it for them then rather than hanging onto it. The one exception is my best friend Katherine – her birthday is special to her and because it’s right next to Christmas, often gets overlooked – so I always make a special effort to find presents for her and also make at least one item.

Do you celebrate your birthday? What do you do to downplay the almost ubiquitous consumerism? How do you handle gifts – do you like to give/receive them? Do you discourage for-the-sake-of-it gifts, and if so, how? What about other people’s birthdays, especially children – how do you handle those?

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