I love giving gifts to friends and family for birthdays and during the holidays and I appreciate the spirit of giving. Through the years, I’ve given jewelry, coffee mugs, candles, wine, signs, books, scarves, flowers, plants, coffees, teas, ornaments, kitchen gadgets, and a multitude of other things. I can look around my home and see years of gifts from family and dear friends.
As my friends and I are getting older, we’ve cut back on gifting because we’re running out of room for these treasures and our priorities have changed. The décor in our homes has changed, along with fashion, our diets, reading habits, likes, and dislikes. It can be hard to know what to give. If I give someone a plant or flowers, I need to be sure they are allergy proof or pet safe if my friend has a cat or dog. Many of my friends no longer wear costume jewelry because they are lucky enough to have the good stuff.
Not every gift I’ve given has been a winner and the same can be said for some of the gifts I’ve received. When is it okay to regift those lovely items we can’t or don’t want to use?
Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve been spending less time in each other’s homes and there has been a flurry of decluttering, redecorating, and remodeling. What have you done with the knick-knacks and mementoes that are perfectly good, but no longer suit your lifestyle? Have you sold, donated, or regifted them?
There are many sides to the regifting debate. Some feel regifting is tacky and you must keep/use every gift you’ve ever received. I tried that and after moving 15 times many of these “lesser-loved” items have been relegated to boxes in the basement or garage doing no one any favors. I’ve donated things to charity and some items blissfully expired giving me no other option, but to discard them. My ex rarely liked the gifts he received. It was more about being uncomfortable accepting gifts than anything else. What avid golfer wouldn’t want a dozen golf balls of the exact brand they use? To be honest, he wasn’t a good gift giver either. I could usually count on receiving a sweater for my June birthday as well as for Christmas.
Many people have no qualms about regifting, giving away, or throwing away gifts they don’t treasure. Some re-gifters are shameless. They will regift the gift right in front of you or give it to you next year. Other re-gifters have a system. They carefully pack away the unloved item with the name of the gifter and wait to regift it to someone the gifter doesn’t know. There is also the desperate re-gifter who regifts a gift because they forgot to give a gift to someone who brought them a gift. If you watch carefully, you will see them disappear briefly and return with a freshly wrapped gift and ink smudges on their fingers from hastily filling out the gift tag.
I have a dear friend who considers the presentation of the gift to be part of the gift, so she carefully selects wrapping and gift bags for each gift she gives.
Fair warning, I do reuse gift bags/boxes (mostly for family) because I’m trying to be environmentally responsible. I know some of my friends think it’s tacky, but I think sending perfectly good things to the landfill and buying more stuff to go to the landfill is far tackier. For special gifts, I will buy a special gift bag and I hope it gets reused.
Is there a right or wrong way to regift? Appreciating the thought behind the gift is more important than how long you keep it or how much you like it. I do think it’s rude to hand the gift to someone and ask them if they want it in front of the person who gave it to you. Yes, that has happened to me before and it’s embarrassing as heck.
My sons love receiving gift cards. Impersonal as they are, they do make sense if you give a gift card from a place they shop. They don’t expire and they can be combined with other gift cards to get something they really want. If they aren’t then they can regift them.