charity gifting for christmas etc (ie gifts that aren't for you but for the greater good) C/D?

I'm really tempted by this. partly because 1. i can never think of what to buy anyone and 2. what i do buy them is thankfully received but mostly forgotten about and by the time new year comes around it's just more stuff that's in the way & 3. i really do think we can do something for the greater good of humanity at gift-giving time.

how would you feel if someone gifted you a card which said that you had just bought a goat or a chicken for an african village (£25 and £5, respectively through oxfam) or mosquito nets to stop malaria (£7) or a water filter (£10)?

if someone gave me this at christmas i think i would be delighted but I'm worried that it might come across as smug.

if you do this should you also buy someone a small gift for them?

they're rad i think. sciaf, in yr hood, do really good work, too; i bought a couple of people libraries for iirc ~£30. nb they're a catholic charity, in case there's any delicacy to that for anybody.

re: the festive politics of giving good-gifts, i think if you are so psyched for getting a gift that you are bummed out when an african village momentarily prospers at your expense, it is probably a good thing that someone got you one of these things to alert you to this.

perfect! i'll check out sciaf and have also looked at unicef and save the children (although other recommendations are welcome) i don't suppose it matters too much which you go for unless someone has a particular interest in e.g. books or goats :)

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It strikes me as a bit peculiar to do this and to frame it as "I did this in your name" or "I did this on your behalf", or "This is my gift to you." Doing a good and unselfish deed for someone else results in a certain feeling of satisfaction, but this feeling is not something that transfers that easily. The recipient of this 'gift' knows they had nothing to do with the decision and for them it exists only by hearsay, which situation is not likely to promote the warm, pleasant thought that they have done something they can be proud of. This is the giver trying to have it both ways.

If I were to do this, I'd frame it a bit differently. I'd take all the money I would otherwise have spent on gifts for other adults and give it to the charity I chose. Then I'd give all those adults some small thing I made: a card, or some other personally created thing, with the explanation that you did this kind of small gift this year so that you could buy X number of goats for an African village instead -- and you know they won't mind and, btw, Merry Christmas!

interesting reply, Aimless, and that was my worry about it seeming smug or self righteous but, i have to say, your alternative seems much the same to me really. i can't see the difference if you're going to let them know about it. i'm definitely not going to start making things for people although i like the idea.

i mean i like the idea that you would do it but i don't like the idea of me doing it!

To my mind it's the difference between "I did this thing and you should be so pleased that I did" and "I did that other thing and that's why I did this here thing."

i understand but i just don't really think it's any different. making someone something for christmas i pretty rad but peculiar in a similar way too.

maybe more so if you yoke it into "plus i bought goats"!

you gave my present to someone else? so you could feel better? fuck you.

what if I wanted goats

did you ever think of that? hmm?

good gifts require thought about the recipient. this sounds like it involves thought about someone else entirely (probably unknown someones, which is charitable, but doesn't sound much like gift-giving), and then maybe about the giver ('i need to be more charitable' / 'less materialistic' / 'i look so decent doing this, won't the recipient be impressed!'), and then only kind of incidentally about the recipient of the non-gift.

i think a wiser course might be to tell everyone you think will give YOU a gift that you'd like them to give to charities out of respect for your wishes. but deciding for them that it would be better to give them no gift and then tell them about this rope-a-dope seems like a passive-aggressive way of telling them that you think they should be more charitable and less materialistic.

I once asked my mother-in-law, the queen of rubbish Christmas presents, to donate to charity for me instead of giving me presents. She donated a fiver to Oxfam then gave me a (rubbish, unwanted) gift in excess of £30 because she didn't want me not to have a present. I decided not to go down that route again (but gifted all her rubbish hats and scarves and bags to the British Heart Foundation). I think you have to be sure the recipients/givers share your view.

I did this with my folks for a couple of years but it just got a bit boring in the end, I'm dead against senseless waste of pointless presents and the agony of xmas shopping but when the only thing you have to look forward to unwrapping is a picture of a goat, that's not really a recipe for Christmas cheer either. But I guess if I got one from a random relative or whoever then I'd be cool with that.

I can see that it's not a good idea to do this year in&out but i've decided that picking this apart is pretty dud. it seems to me that you can make your charity gifting "about the recipient" as much as any other gift. personally i'd be thrilled if someone gave me one of these gifts but maybe that's because i have no use for gifts and 90+% of gifts i've received have gone in a cupboard or been passed on to charity shops anyway.

more specifically i can see that it may be a good thing for me to e.g. gift a chicken for a family on behalf of e.g. my seven year old nephew who gets so much crap it may be a good thing for him to think about someone other than himself of christmas day and that he may actually enjoy that fact and may be excited by it.

he will not be and you know it perfectly well

i do not!

For a seven year old boy the excitement quotient of invisible gift chickens is low compared to invisible gift AK-47s.

yeah, my mom used to do this to my kids and it didn't go over well. When she moaned about not getting thank you notes from them, I told her to get a clue.

they sent the thank you notes to the children of bosnia instead iirc

how shallow of her not to appreciate that

oh. come on.

:D

All my relatives talk about needing to downsize and declutter when I ask them about Christmas presents. And one of them proclaimed a few years ago that Christmas had become--shock shock horror horror--hyper-commercialized. So I "buy" a beehive through Oxfam and send them a card announcing this. They seem pleased.

i understand the thought, but giving the seven-year-old nephew a book would be better imo

something by milton friedman would be favourite

nah, "Theory of the Leisure Class"

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