Ecofrugal gifting games

Happy holidays, everyone! This year, in place of my usual Green Gift Roundup, I'm going to talk about two specific ways our family exchanged secondhand gifts this year. Both of these were gift swaps of a sort, but each involved a different type of gift and was run according to different rules.

The first gift exchange was Brian's solution to the always tricky question of what to give the seven niblings (the delightful gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) on his side of the family. They range in age from 13 to 19, and we only really see them at Christmastime. Thus, all we really know about their current activities and interests is what Brian hears secondhand from his parents throughout the year. This makes it difficult to select gifts tailored to their tastes. The one thing we know they're all into is reading, but we have no way of knowing which specific books would appeal to each of them and which ones they've already read.

So this year, Brian came up with a clever workaround. He went through the collection of secondhand books we had stashed in our "possible gifts" box and selected five he thought would appeal to a broad range of tastes. (All of these were books we had read ourselves and deemed enjoyable.) The authors represented included Neil Gaiman, Jane Austen, Jasper Fforde, P.G. Wodehouse, and Alexander McCall Smith. Since all of the works were fiction, he also ordered two nonfiction books we had read and liked—How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg and Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein—from Better World Books to add more variety to the mix.  His idea was to wrap these seven books and have all the kids take turns choosing books according to the rules of the classic Yankee swap.

However, he decided that one book per nibling, especially with most of them being yard-sale and library-sale finds we'd acquired for under $5, wasn't quite enough of a present. His original plan was to enclose a gift certificate to Half Price Books with each one so they could add a second book (or two) of their own choice. But when he discovered that the smallest available denomination was $25 and multiplied that by seven kids, he decided that was a little too big a present. Instead, we went to the bank and got a bunch of $5 bills and he stashed three of them inside each book. And to make things more interesting, he decided to choose the pages where the bills were hidden so that the first letters of the verso pages—read in alphabetical order based on the author's names—would spell out the hidden message, "Read a book for Christmas." Then he would offer an additional prize (the three books we had left in our box) to whichever kid managed to crack the code first.

This plan underwent a slight change at the last minute when we learned that one of the niblings was bringing their girlfriend along for Christmas. Since we didn't want her to feel left out, we decided to wrap up one of our three extra books and add it to the mix. We didn't have three more $5 bills between us, so instead we enclosed a $5 and a $10 and changed the secret message to "Read a book for Christmas, eh?" (He gave them the additional hint that the addition of the eighth book had made the message Canadian.) To randomize the order in which kids would choose books, he gave each of them a state quarter and had them go in alphabetical order by state.

By nearly all measures, this exchange was a great success. All eight kids ended up with books they liked, and they had great fun choosing books, stealing each other's selections, and solving the riddle. Since they all worked together to find the solution, Brian just offered the two extra books to the group as a whole, along with the additional cash prize of a $2 bill he had in his wallet that he knew he'd never be able to bring himself to spend. And with all seven books being secondhand (and five of the seven wrapped in reused wrapping paper), they were eco-friendly gift choices as well.

The one area in which this gift idea fell down slightly was on the frugality front. When you add together the $15 cash hidden in each book, the $53.52 we spent on the books themselves, the $2 additional prize, and the $2 worth of state quarters he doled out as tokens, the total cost of the book exchange was $177.52, or $22.19 per kid. That may not sound like much, but it's more than the average amount we typically spend on gifts, many of which are usually secondhand or homemade. Adding the books plus cash to our gift list made this our most expensive holiday season yet by a significant margin. And based on the kids' reactions, I don't think the hidden cash made the books that much more exciting as a present than they would have been on their own. So I'm hoping we haven't set a standard with these gifts that we'll now be expected to live up to in future years.

The other gift exchange was the brainchild of my mother-in-law. She had done a Yankee swap with us last year, using a variety of small but useful gifts (the most coveted present was a set of earbuds, but we were equally happy with the giant box of brownie mix we ended up with), and it was such a hit that the kids specially requested some version of the same thing this year. So she obliged, but with a twist: She called this year's gift exchange "the heritage edition." She wrapped up one box for each family member, each containing some heirloom item that had been part of the family for some time. Some of these items dated back to my husband's childhood, some to his parents' childhood, and some went back several generations. Some of them—such as a big milk can that used to store all the family's gloves, hats, and scarves next to the door—were too big to fit in boxes, so she instead wrapped up a small trinket to represent the actual gift. And each box also contained a card outlining the provenance of that particular item and its place in the family history.

Rather than randomize the order, she had us choose boxes in reverse order by age, starting with our 13-year-old nephew and working our way up the line to Brian, her firstborn. Once we'd each opened one box, we had the opportunity to trade with each other to get each item to the person who had most interest in it. The family heirlooms included old quilts, whimsical pieces of porcelain, one grandfather's old slide rule, and another grandfather's truly hardcore kite-flying kit, complete with two large kites, a massive reel, and thousands of feet of string. I drew a vintage set of stainless-steel drafting tools that had once belonged to Brian's engineer grandfather (still in mint condition, though the case was damaged), but swapped it for an antique hat rack that's sitting beside the desk where I'm typing this now. And the youngest nibling ended up with his great-great-grandmother's old "potato bug" mandolin—an instrument he had never played before, but on which he was doing a creditable rendition of "Rocky Road to Dublin" within ten minutes of picking it up.

This gift exchange was even more ecofrugal than ours. The gifts themselves didn't cost a cent, yet they were all more meaningful to the recipients than something from a store could ever be. And as one niece slyly pointed out, the exchange also helped our in-laws clear some unused stuff out of their home—a nice little bonus gift for them.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all an ecofrugal new year!