The primary line of Louisa Might Alcott’s Little Ladies is “Christmas received’t be Christmas with out presents”, whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 brief story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, particularly, girls making an attempt to assist one another work out how finest to navigate the duty of selecting them. It’s a mark of your columnist’s sluggish wits, then, that after 20 years of writing columns in regards to the economics of Christmas, he has solely simply observed the connection between Christmas items and girls.
The traditional examine of this matter was revealed within the Journal of Client Analysis in 1990 by Eileen Fischer and Stephen J Arnold. Fischer and Arnold interviewed virtually 300 folks about their seasonal gift-giving attitudes and behaviours. Many males refused to reply, suggesting that they didn’t know something in regards to the topic and that the researchers actually ought to interview their wives as an alternative.
The boys who did reply the questions had been presumably extra progressive than those that refused, besides the outcomes had been stark: girls purchased items for a bigger variety of folks (greater than half as many once more) and began buying earlier. Additionally they took extra care, spending extra time per individual, spending much less cash and, so far as we will inform, giving fewer items that wanted to be returned or exchanged. Shopping for, selecting and wrapping Christmas items was broadly considered girls’s work.
(A subsequent examine, revealed within the Journal of Client Advertising and marketing by Michel Laroche and colleagues, additionally concluded that ladies began looking for Christmas items a lot earlier within the yr, had been extra diligent in gathering details about what merchandise had been obtainable, and completed the duty earlier.)
Males, in the meantime, had a bent to purchase items that had been as a lot for their very own pleasure as anybody else’s. Any lady whose boyfriend or husband has thoughtfully given them elaborate but impractical lingerie will little doubt nod in recognition, however these “self items” additionally embody toys for the kids that dad thinks is likely to be enjoyable to play with.
For males, Christmas items are both someone else’s drawback, or they’re frivolous and enjoyable. Many ladies could not see them fairly like that.
In 1984, the sociologist Theodore Caplow revealed an ethnographic examine of Christmas rituals in Muncie, Indiana. Caplow described a posh set of unwritten guidelines, to which most households adhered although no person had ever fairly seen them articulated. A number of of those guidelines involved the function of girls: “Ladies had been way more energetic as present givers than males, and did practically all the present wrapping”; and one other bombshell, “Though married girls had been largely accountable for Christmas present giving, they didn’t favor their very own kinfolk over their husbands’.”
In different phrases, many a spouse was accountable for shopping for the items not just for her mother and father, siblings, nieces and nephews, however for these of her husband too. Caplow added that 57 per cent of girls had been solely accountable for wrapping items, however solely 16 per cent of males. In a barely earlier examine, Caplow additionally concluded that ladies had been accountable, both solely or collectively with another person, for 84 per cent of all items. One suspects that a lot of the “joint” items from married {couples} had been actually organized by the wives, however even excluding joint items, girls had been accountable for greater than twice as many items as males.
How severely ought to we take research of gender roles which are many years previous? In spite of everything, as Corinne Low describes in her new e book Femonomics, quite a bit has modified up to now few many years. By 2015, US girls aged 25-45 had been averaging about 10 hours per week extra paid market work than in 1975, and about 10 hours per week much less housekeeping. Shouldn’t we anticipate these previous attitudes to Christmas organisation to evaporate?
Maybe not. Low notes that ladies additionally spend six hours per week extra time on childcare. (Males’s contribution to childcare has elevated, however much less and from a a lot decrease base.) And housekeeping contributions are stubbornly unrelated to financial incentives: “A person who earns solely 20 per cent of the family revenue does about the identical quantity of housekeeping as a person who earns 80 per cent!” writes Low.
In any case, argues economist Bernd Stauss in his 2023 e book chapter “Presents and Gender: Santa Claus is a Lady”, there’s something significantly cussed about gender roles at Christmas. Stauss opinions the literature and concludes that ladies nonetheless appear to be those shopping for the joint items and wrapping all of the presents. Why? Maybe as a result of many items, significantly these purchased by girls, are about sustaining relationships with the prolonged household. (Or, as sociologists name it, “kin preserving”.) All yr spherical it’s typically the ladies making the telephone calls and arranging the household visits, and at Christmas that extends to writing the Christmas playing cards and co-ordinating the spherical of internet hosting and visiting — and, naturally, to coping with the Christmas items.
As Caplow factors out, the unwritten guidelines governing these items are surprisingly intricate. Presents are presupposed to match the (additionally unwritten) worth of the connection. A son-in-law or daughter-in-law is meant to get the identical worth of present because the blood relative they married; it might be extraordinarily awkward to provide a extra helpful present to a niece than to a daughter, or to provide very completely different items to 2 of 1’s personal offspring; mother and father are allowed to provide money to their offspring, however by no means vice versa, even when everyone seems to be an grownup. These guidelines characterize a social minefield, and unintended detonations are usually not unusual. Frivolous and enjoyable it’s not.
This isn’t to disclaim that some folks get pleasure from the entire enterprise. (Regardless of my annual warnings towards wasteful gift-giving at Christmas, I confess a keenness for the duty.) However the level is that selecting and wrapping Christmas items is a job that appears optionally available for males, whereas for ladies social pressures make all of it however obligatory.
Ladies chafing below this unequal duty have some scorched-earth ways obtainable, together with flat refusal or, the trail chosen by Corinne Low, divorcing hubby and marrying a girl as an alternative. If that appears radical, there’s all the time the choice of a frank dialog and a his-and-hers guidelines.
Or simply grin and bear it. Fischer and Arnold interviewed a number of girls who “described their buying in phrases that indicated that, of their minds, it was actual work that needed to be carried out effectively and successfully”.
An environment friendly and efficient Christmas! That seems like a job for an economist — and for my subsequent column.
Written for and first revealed within the Monetary Occasions on 27 November 2025.
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