Santa vs. Scrooge I'm pondering why some people love picking out gifts for people and why others don't. And no, I don't think it's because the people who don't are cheap - the Scrooge thing was just the first title that occurred to me;-)→[More:]

This thread on AskMe about how to be a good gift giver got me thinking about the whole gift giving endeavour. I really enjoy selecting and making gifts. I like the intellectual exercise of figuring out what the person would like, and love the Lady Bountiful feeling of being generous. To my mind the ultimate success in gift giving is when you give someone something they never would have thought of asking for but really love and use to death. I’m very complimented when I later see something I’ve made, like a sweater, is looking worn. I really enjoy thinking about the person I care about, pondering their interests, needs and tastes, and coming to conclusions like, “Hmm, my little niece loves to draw so much but she isn’t showing any especial talent for it. Maybe that’s due to lack of proper instruction at school rather than lack of ability, though, so I’ll get her a kid’s art instruction book for her birthday.”

I don’t really get people who don’t like picking out gifts. There does seem to be a gender divide in this area, with men much more likely to hate present selection than women, though of course I can think of lots of exceptions. All the women in my family like picking out presents as much as I do, but the men seem to hate Christmas shopping and leave it to the women as much as they can, or procrastinate until Christmas Eve (and who wouldn’t hate shopping then – shudder). A TV program I saw years ago did a little segment on how much men hate Christmas shopping. The crew put monitors on the men and sent them shopping and found their stress levels went up to the equivalent of fighter pilots or cops doing crowd control.

The problem for people who hate preparing gifts seems to lie in hating having to select the gifts, rather than minding merely buying things. My sister-in-law gave my brother a general list and sent him out to do the Christmas shopping a few years ago (after two decades of doing it all herself). He did just fine. A friend of mine has to tell her husband what to get her. One year she refused to tell him what to buy her for her birthday, insisting she wanted to be surprised… so he didn’t get her anything at all. A married couple I know say they never buy each other gifts anymore because they just don’t enjoy selecting things for each other and worrying that the other person might not like it.

I don’t think it’s usually the case that people who don’t enjoy selecting gifts aren’t good at it. It’s been my observation that most of them do very well at picking out stuff when they make the effort. Maybe it's more of a confidence issue?

But I'm groping in the dark here. If you don’t like this process of buying gifts, can you explain why?