heard from others is that we don't gift adults outside the immediate family. For instance, we have five grown children, all of which now have children of their own. We give one gift each to our adult children and we give 3-4 gifts and a stocking to our grand kids/step-grand kids. We also adopt one family, which this year was a member of our extended family (1 gift), his daughter (4 gifts), and his long-time girlfriend (1 gift) - they were also fed a Christmas feast and spent the day with us. Anyways, we set a limit and stick to it. We spent a total of $1200 this Christmas to gift to 20 people, an average of $60 per person. And the wife and I got each other something.
To contrast, when our adult children were still minors and living at home they each got more like 20-22 gifts and we gifted our brothers, sisters, close co-workers, friends, and each and every extended family member with we had regular contact. Our Christmas budget from 5-10 years ago was always around $2400 in those days and at times we went over.
From about 5 or so years ago to now we slowly drew back our Christmas spending as we lowered our per-person allowance and then eventually eliminated all extended family from our Christmas list. And as we eliminated extended family we explained to them that we're giving our Christmases back to our children and more often than not we saw relief in their reactions. Turns out our new attitude was readily welcomed by those extended family members as the financial burden was heavy and no one ever knew what to get anyone else anyway. And they were glad to give Christmas back to their children also.
So, these days our Christmas bill is half what it was a few years ago and I've heard a LOT of friends, family, and acquaintances say that they are doing the same, gifting the children or only their immediate families. I believe this is a general trend in America spurred on by a lax economy, less disposable income, high gas prices taking up even more of what would have been disposable income, and a host of other factors.
Also, I believe there is just a lack of any really new products to spur buying excitement save the latest version of a favorite gaming console or smart phone. iPads and the like are too expensive for most people to gift. Walmart is also a factor, soaking up a good portion of the Christmas bounty on mostly unexciting merchandise that only inspires consumers due to cost considerations.The only thing I've been excited about recently is a Kindle and I already have one of those.
In conclusion, like you, I suspect what we are seeing is indeed a combination of a still-slow economy and a return to consumer sanity but also little to be excited about in the way of new products and gas prices during the rest of the year thrown in.
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