Christmas presents

There are two ways to look at the tradition of gift-giving at Christmas. The first is the traditional portrait of a family gathered around a Christmas tree, unwrapping brightly colored packages. The second is of stores full of shoppers, roaming the aisles like hawks looking for field mice, ready to pounce on the perfect gift at the right price.

It’s hard to say which vision is most accurate. Giving and receiving gifts is an integral part of Christmas as a ritual, with its roots firmly grounded in history dating back to ancient Rome. Shopping for Christmas presents, on the other hand, has become a ritual of its own over time, with an increasing emphasis on the commercial aspect of the holiday.

One thing is certain: For better or worse, both are linked hand-in-hand as part of the Christmas tradition.

How it started

As with many aspects of the Christmas celebration, there is some amount of disagreement as to the origins of gift-giving.  Some believe that the practice of exchanging presents traces back to the birth of Jesus, when the Magi, or “wise men,” traveled to visit the Christ child with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  But the history of gift-giving actually goes a great deal farther back, to a pre-Christian celebration in ancient Rome.

Dating back as far as the Third Century B.C., Saturnalia was a festival celebrating the Winter Solstice and honoring Saturn, the Roman god of seed and sowing.  It was a raucous occasion that spanned several days, and included games, a huge public banquet, and other events devoted primarily to pleasure and (sometimes) debauchery.  Gift-giving also was part of the fun. Adults exchanged such items as food, wine, candles or perfume, while children often received clay figurines. Often, gift-giving became a sort of punishment, as emperors demanded gifts from citizens who had fallen out of favor.

Over the centuries, pagan rituals such as Saturnalia were banned as part of the rise of Christianity. However, the practice of gift-giving proved a little more difficult to outlaw, since everybody loves to give and receive, so church leaders used the gifts of the Magi as a way to justify continuing the ritual as part of Christmas.

How it flourished

The practice of holiday gift-giving has survived in a wide variety of forms worldwide, despite social and religious upheaval over the centuries. But it especially took hold in Victorian England during the mid-1800s as a family oriented Christmas event that incorporated fun rituals such as the “Christmas Pie,” which was actually a large bowl of grain with small gifts hidden inside. Children would gather around the bowl after dinner, and dip into it with spoons to pull out the gifts.  Another ritual involved a “cobweb party,” in which children would follow different strands of colored yarn strung throughout the house, eventually leading to a wrapped present at the end.

The Victorian traditions eventually made their way across the Atlantic and became part of the American version of Christmas. Presents are typically exchanged on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, either wrapped as presents under a tree or placed inside a Christmas stocking.

During the early 1800s, gifts were typically homemade items such as cookies, clothes or toys, and occasionally coins. That would all change with the beginning of the industrial revolution, as the mass production of goods switched the emphasis from homemade to store-bought.

Business takes control

No discussion of Christmas gift-giving is complete without recognizing commercial influences. It began quietly in the 1820s, with the first Christmas-oriented newspaper advertisements. Macy’s upped the ante in 1867 by keeping its New York department store open on Christmas Eve for last-minute shoppers.

Macy’s took the lead again in 1924 with its first Thanksgiving Day parade, which was originally known as the Christmas Parade. It wound through the streets of New York and ended at Macy’s flagship store. It not only drew an estimated crowd of 250,000, but it also solidified Macy’s status as a shopping destination. When it became an annual event, it quickly became the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season.  In fact, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the date for Thanksgiving forward by one week, tacking on seven days to the holiday shopping season.

The day after Thanksgiving would eventually be popularized as “Black Friday,” and marketed aggressively as the busiest shopping day of the year. Retailers use special offers and sales to draw crowds that account for approximately 5 percent of all holiday retail spending, but it’s not really the busiest day for Christmas shopping. In recent years, last-minute shoppers have typically bestowed that honor to the Saturday before Christmas.

Christmas all year long

Over time, retailers have begun to ignore the day after Thanksgiving as the start of the Christmas shopping season. It’s not unusual to see the first Christmas shopping ads appear well before Halloween, and some retailers use “Christmas in July” campaigns to spur sales. Internet sales have also changed the habits of Christmas shoppers, drawing more than $29.1 billion in sales in November and December of 2009, according to data from the digital marketing analysis firm comScore.

Overall, though, that’s a relatively small drop in the bucket. Even in a lackluster economy, the market intelligence firm BIGresearch is predicting more than $447 billion overall in Christmas-related spending in 2010.

And that’ll buy an awful lot of gold, frankincense and myrrh.