Now, I don’t want this to come over as all Scroogelike....because generally speaking I quite enjoy Christmas...but this month the over 50s in this country are going to waste more than £1 billion on unwanted Christmas gifts!
It is unavoidable, will cause untold stress to the givers, hurt the feelings of the receivers – but leave shopkeepers rubbing their hands with glee.
My theory goes like this. There are 21 million people over the age of 50. If each one of us spends an average of £100 on Christmas gifts this year, that would be £2.1 billion ringing through the tills.
But apart from buying for immediate family, where the chances are that we have a pretty good idea what will be well received (although I’ll come back to that minefield later...) we are simply shooting in the dark for nieces, nephews, grandchildren and friends.
We will buy gifts for this extended family with no real clue as to their likes and dislikes, their correct sizes, their preferred choice of deodorants, perfumes or even the colour of their socks.
Yet blindly we dive into a retail frenzy of selecting, buying, wrapping and giving.
And I reckon that at least half of the presents we end up giving will never be worn, sniffed, read or played with.....£1 billion of our money down the drain.
And yet this is an annual ritual which has been going on for as long as presents have been given and received. We all have our own growing up tales of hand-knitted jumpers, or weird gloves with no fingers, or novelty ties, novelty socks, or toys designed for someone five years younger, lovingly wrapped by ageing aunts we last saw five years before.
Do these memories guide us in our present buying now that we are on the other end? No. We still end up making a list of people to buy for, working out how much to spend on each of them, and then agonising over what to get.
There is no easy answer. You can try resorting to cash, that always goes down well with teenagers particularly. But if you only want to spend £5, does it look mean just giving the money, when you can buy a gaudily decorated piece of plastic and cardboard packaging, with pictures of snow and holly and a multi-purpose golfing tool cocooned inside for the same price? (Even if they don’t play golf?)
You could buy a book token (do kids actually read any more?)....or you could buy a gift token. But then you run into the same value issue as with cash...and how do you choose which shop to buy the token in?
You could buy sweets – and run the risk of offending some yummy mummy who doesn’t allow little Jane or Johnny to eat sugary treats because it triggers their hyperactive condition.
But whatever you settle on, you can bet that at least half of your stressed purchases are either destined to sit on a shelf, be taken back to the shop, or even passed on at a car boot sale when the weather warms up. You just can’t win, so resign yourself to it and look on it as a contribution to the recovering retail sector.
Concentrate instead on getting the other half of your spending right. Make sure that the presents you buy for the immediate family are spot on.
For women of course, this comes naturally. Wives can read their husbands like a book. They know when we are running out of things before we do. They know what we like (because they’ve conditioned us over the years) and – more importantly – they actually enjoy Christmas shopping.
For us mere men however, we will still struggle to second guess what she would like this year and wait with baited breath on Christmas Day while she fights her way through the badly wrapped package, tied up in a whole roll of sticky tape.
Get it right and the festive season will bring joy and happiness all round. Get it wrong and the atmosphere will be frostier inside than out.
Apparently, the divorce rate among couples approaching and entering retirement is now one of the fastest rising. I suspect it might be down to too many years of badly received Christmas presents rather than any infidelity or incurable snoring.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, there will have been many hints dropped, but it is almost certain we will have missed them. Magazines left lying around, open at pages displaying jewellery, or handbags, or perfume, will have been ignored.
So we end up exercising our own judgement – which truly is a hit or miss situation – and throw ourselves on the mercy of sales assistants who must find it hard to resist laughing at our attempts.
Christmas...don’
• Dick Lumsden is Managing Director of Senioragency, one of the few companies specialising in marketing and advertising to the 50+ group. If you have any views, or are over 50 and would like to take part in occasional consumer research, please contact him on dlumsden@senioragency.co.uk or sign up on his website at www.senioragency.co.uk
