Presents

Around this time last year my soon-to-be wife and I were finalising the preparations for our wedding. There are many questions that will be endlessly asked of newly-wed (or soon-to-be-wed) couples: How did you meet? How long have you known each other? Do the parents approve? But for me the worst question was “What do you want as a wedding present?” - and for two reasons.

Firstly, my wife and I had managed to inherit or buy most of the crockery, cutlery, cookware and linen that we needed to run our house in the early days of living together and by the time our wedding was drawing close we couldn’t think of anything else that we really needed.

The only suggestion I could make was for a new can-opener (ours had broken a few days after the wedding invites had gone out) and it was quite a challenge to convince people I was being serious.

Continue reading "‘Tis the season of useless bloody gifts" »

Deck the halls and fill the cupboards; despite the pre-Yuletide complaints from some shops Christmas is invariably a multi-billion dollar smorgasboard of retail excess.

The question, though, is what to do with all that stuff once you’ve unwrapped it?

Because it’s not like we truly need a lot of it.

Continue reading "What are you doing with all those unwanted gifts?" »

For retailers, the miracle of Christmas hasn’t got anything to do with a heavily pregnant woman and a manger, but rather anticipated sales of $39.9 billion dollars between mid-November and December 24.

The slap up meal most of us will be tucking into on the 25th accounts for a big chunk of this spending but many billions of dollars will also be spent on gifts. 

Perhaps the scariest part about this is the billions that will be spent on fizzers: gifts that don’t hit the mark, gifts that don’t even get airborne; gifts that break before the New Year; gifts that you need to keep out of sight and then retrieve whenever the relevant donor is in the vicinity. 

Continue reading "Presenting: A guide to Christmas gift giving" »