Editor's note: We're taking a few days off for the holidays but sending an abbreviated newsletter today to help with your post-Christmas declutter. We'll be back on December 30. Happy holidays, and see you then!

Joey Sendaydiego/Vox

Over a single holiday season, let alone an entire lifetime, you might amass a pile of stuff you won’t ever use.

The National Retail Federation estimates that last winter, about $966 billion worth of merchandise was sold over the holiday period — and about $148 billion of that was likely returned. According to Statista, the most wanted Christmas gift among US consumers is cold hard cash. The second most popular? Gift cards.

The message seems to be: Thanks for the thought, but just let me choose what I want.

Standard etiquette advises us to remain gracious even in the face of laughably bad gifts. So how do we handle the gifts we don’t want — well-meaning or not? Here are some tips on what to do with the stuff you’d rather not hold onto, before it starts to take up valuable space in your home and mind.

In the ideal gift exchange scenario, we probably want to grace the people in our lives with gifts that will be met with undeniable enthusiasm. So why is it that we so often end up saddled with bad ones?

Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University, explains that "We really focus on making people happy the moment that they’re opening the gift.” In other words, gift-givers prioritize the drama of a big reveal, as opposed to whether the gift is actually useful. We also might overestimate how passionate someone is about a hobby, sports team, or something else they once mentioned offhand. People can simply miss the mark because we don’t know enough about each other. 

The question of what to do with gifts you won’t use is a popular etiquette question “in a world of more and more consumer goods,” according to Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert at the Emily Post Institute. Generally, “gifts should be received in the same spirit of generosity that they’re given in,” Senning says. “If you don’t particularly appreciate the gift itself, the expectation is that you thank [them] for the effort or thought that went into it.”

Senning says that it’s not a cardinal sin to regift something if you know you can’t use it — for example, if you already happen to have the item. But you should avoid regifting anything handmade or personalized. “Beyond that, it’s about being upfront, ethical, honest” with the original gifter, if they ask, and the new recipient, Senning said.

While some may consider maintaining a gift wishlist to be gauche, if you’re concerned about your growing pile of unused gifts, taking the surprise out of gift-giving in the future does seem like the preferable option. (According to Senning, it’s perfectly all right for gifters to ask for some direction on what gifts someone would like.)

In the meantime, when getting rid of gifts, “It’s usually easier to begin [your initial decluttering] with items that have less sentimental value,” says Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach who has written about what to do with unwanted gifts. If you can’t re-gift it, donating your unwanted gifts is also a good approach. Clothes — a common but often miscalculated gift — jewelry, and household goods can all go to a Goodwill location or a local family shelter. Furniture, appliances, and other household items can also be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore program.

“One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever,” Landau-Pope says. Take holiday cards, which may be piling up in your drawer or taking over your fridge. Landau-Pope’s policy is to keep handmade cards from her children, while displaying the others for a set period of time, taking a picture of the display, and then recycling them.

Unfortunately, research shows there are sometimes more sinister motives behind subpar gifts. For one, some people know exactly what a recipient wants — maybe they have a gift registry — but they buy something else anyway because the options presented are boring to them personally, Givi says. Research also shows that people resist choosing gifts (like, say, a nice pair of sunglasses) that are better than the versions they own, likely to avoid feeling envious.

Sentimental gifts — for example, something handmade or connected to a memory that the two of you share — are often underrated by gift-givers. 

Deborah Cohn, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology, has identified five broad patterns for how lousy gifts happen. Typically, bad gift-giving habits stem from pure self-centeredness, like picking out headphones for your spouse that you intend to use or wanting bragging rights for giving the splashiest gift at the party. “It’s thinking more about yourself than the recipient, and people can see right through it,” Cohn contends. 

A more aggressive (but all too common) type of bad gift-giving is when the gift is intended to impose a certain identity on the recipient. It’s not that these givers don’t understand what their recipients' real preferences are — it’s that they want to foist their own desire upon them.

“This actually happened to me,” Cohn says. “Somebody gave me a book about a religion that I don’t ascribe to.”

Cohn recalls the memory of a bad gift she got in childhood: a prank played on her by her father in which every gift box just contained a smaller one, with nothing inside the last. It motivated her to study what gifts mean and how people communicate through them. She told her mother how the prank had made her feel; when Cohn finished her dissertation, her mother gave her another set of nested boxes, this time full of chocolates.

“I think that was the best gift I ever got because she wanted to take away my pain. That’s what that gift was meant to do,” she says.

Are you enjoying the Today, Explained newsletter? Forward it to a friend; they can sign up for it right here. 

And as always, we want to know what you think. Specifically: If there is a topic you want us to explain or a story you’re curious to learn more about, let us know by filling out this form or just replying to this email. 

Today’s edition was produced and edited by staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you next week!

Become a member to support fearless, independent journalism.

This email was sent to you. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution.

View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.

Vox Media, 1701 Rhode Island. NW, Washington, DC 20036.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.