Young people are most afraid of giving gifts during the Chinese New Year.

The New Year is coming, and many people are already on their way back home. How can we show our great kindness through a small New Year gift? We feel bad about spending money, and we don’t want to be kidnapped by kindness. Let’s read the following together~

There are still a few days until the first day of the Lunar New Year. Have you bought the gifts for your hometown for the New Year?

Young people who have worked hard outside for a year have mixed feelings about the upcoming Spring Festival. They are happy because some people haven't been back to their hometowns for many years and miss their hometowns, their parents, and the family gathering together to eat a hot meal. They are worried because they are homesick and feel pressured to buy gifts for their parents and relatives.

Giving gifts to family and relatives is not an easy task. Not only does it empty your wallet, but you also have to spend a lot of time and effort to prepare.

Before the New Year, the topic of "spending 1500 yuan on New Year's goods for visiting relatives" became a hot search on Weibo. One netizen shared that in the first year of his marriage, he spent nearly 10,000 yuan on New Year's goods and red envelopes for his relatives. After deducting the amount of red envelopes received from relatives, he lost about 1,500 yuan. In the comment area, most netizens believed that spending only 1,500 yuan on visiting relatives and buying New Year's goods was not a lot. Many people spent tens of thousands of yuan on New Year's Eve, which was a month's salary.

As they grow older, young people gradually find that they need to give gifts not only to their parents, but also to relatives on behalf of their parents. How to give gifts during the Chinese New Year is really a science.

Neither too expensive nor too practical is the best answer. The closeness of relatives and family status will also affect the choice of gifts. More often than not, the gifts given out may not only face the problem of not being delivered to the right point and being unused by the other party, but may also be compared with gifts given by relatives and peers.

The status of the Spring Festival in the hearts of Chinese people is unshakable. During such a festival, it is understandable for the younger generation to express their feelings and keep in touch with each other through gifts. However, gift-giving should not become a shackle of human relations and formalism. Communication, understanding and consideration between each other are the best ways.

1. Young people cannot avoid giving gifts during the Chinese New Year.

Every Chinese New Year, young people are always stumped by the same problem: what gifts should they give to their parents and relatives?

Giving gifts is a test of one’s heart, and giving gifts during the Spring Festival is a double test of one’s emotional intelligence and financial resources, and one has to hand in the answer sheet.

An Wen, who works in Guangzhou and hasn't been back to his hometown for the New Year for two years, was buying New Year's goods while scrambling for train tickets. This was his first year preparing gifts for his relatives. What to buy, how much to buy, and who to buy for were all difficult problems. In the end, he decided on an idea: to buy foods that were not available in his hometown and that his relatives had never tasted.

He first returned to Jinan from Guangzhou and stayed overnight at his third aunt's house. At first, he only prepared a roast goose gift box and a New Year gift box issued by the company. He felt that it was a bit too little, so he prepared a box each of Guangzhou's classic local snacks, chicken biscuits and peanut crisps, as well as the local Yinghong No. 9 tea. This tea has several price ranges from 25 yuan/half catty to 100 yuan/half catty. In the end, he chose a mid-range one with a red gift bag at 65 yuan/half catty.

Anwen bought Guangzhou dim sum for his relatives

Before going to bed at night, the more he thought about it, the more he felt that it was inappropriate. "If my third aunt comes to visit my uncle's house during the New Year and says that these are the snacks she brought back from Guangzhou, my uncle will feel that he is being neglected." In order not to favor one over the other, he prepared a box of tea, a box of chicken biscuits, and a box of peanut crisps for each of his five relatives, including his uncle, first aunt, third aunt, fourth aunt, and third aunt. He spent a total of 640 yuan, plus five boxes of roast goose gift boxes for 1,290 yuan, totaling nearly 2,000 yuan.

It was inconvenient to carry too much luggage on the road, so he first mailed the roast goose gift box back to his hometown, and then packed five boxes of tea in his suitcase. He could only carry the five boxes of snacks in his hands to avoid crushing them. "On the train back to my hometown, there were many young people like me who carried these gifts back by hand," said An Wen.

For Shuangshuang, the "New Year's greetings" from relatives in the first year after marriage were simply too many and too complicated. She described herself as a person who had changed from a young person who only cared about looking good before marriage to a humble adult who had to give gifts during the New Year. The difficulty and cost of buying gifts increased almost exponentially.

Under her mother's guidance, she made an Excel spreadsheet, with four families of uncles, aunts, and grandmothers, and three families of grandma and two uncles. Each family spent 5,068 yuan on a pack of Zhonghua cigarettes, two bottles of Haizhilan, and a box of milk. Shuangshuang's lovers also spent more than 5,000 yuan, which added up to more than 10,000 yuan.

After marriage, they went back to their hometown to celebrate the Spring Festival, which was a big financial pressure. Shuangshuang explained that on the one hand, they had to buy gifts every year, and if they gave a little to each family, the total cost would be a lot; on the other hand, they only went back to their hometown during the Spring Festival, and the things they bought could not be too cheap, otherwise they would not be able to give them away.

In the past, year-end bonuses were used for travel or purchasing large electronic products, but this year's year-end bonuses were set aside for gifts to relatives on both sides and red envelopes to parents on both sides. In addition, a portion of the funds must be reserved for New Year's money for the children of relatives.

Mu Yao, who has been giving gifts to elders since her first year of work, knows well the difficulty of gift-giving. Over the years, she has even summed up a set of gift-giving methodology.

She usually gives gifts according to the closeness of the relationship, the family status of the relatives, and the seniority of the relatives. After the death of an old person in the family, the new generation of the family leader has the highest status, and the gifts given every year will be relatively heavier; the gifts for relatives who visit frequently will be heavier than those for ordinary relatives, and the gifts for some relatives who have stopped contacting but have started to contact again will be lighter; except for the elders, peers rarely give gifts to each other, and when peers have the next generation, they need to give red envelopes when they visit to pay New Year's greetings.

As some of the elders have gone to live with their children in other places in recent years, Mu Yao now only prepares gifts for his second uncle's family, which are basically two bottles of Wuliangye with donkey-hide gelatin or ginseng, a box of milk, and a box of fruit, spending about 3,000 yuan. "Because my second uncle likes to drink, and my cousins ​​have higher incomes than me, they will also specially collect very old wines as gifts."

The gift-giving spending of these young people is not an exception. According to CBNData, the budget for buying New Year gifts is concentrated in 3,000-4,000 yuan, up 10% year-on-year. Among them, for consumers with a monthly income of less than 10,000 yuan, New Year gift-giving expenses account for more than 40% of their monthly income, which means they are "spending a lot of money" on gifts.

2. What’s the difficulty in giving gifts during the Chinese New Year?

As the year draws to a close, topics such as "It's too hard to give gifts during the Chinese New Year" and "Giving gifts during the Chinese New Year is hard for young people" have received tens of millions of views on social media platforms, with many netizens complaining and offering advice to each other in the comment section. Why is it so hard to give gifts during the Chinese New Year?

Elders are not used to expressing themselves and have different lifestyles from young people. There is no standard answer for gift giving, so it is difficult to touch the heart. If the gift is too high-end, it will give you face, but it may not be practical, which can easily cause pressure; if the gift is too practical, it is easy to duplicate others' gifts and fail to show your heart.

Jiang Lai has a deep understanding of this. She bought a cashmere scarf for her grandmother before, but later found that she usually liked to wear a headscarf to facilitate work. The scarf was only worn once during the Chinese New Year and then was left unused. In addition, she also gave massagers and skin care sets to her aunts, but later learned from her mother that the massagers were given to others by her aunts because they didn't know how to use them. They didn't have the habit of skin care, so the skin care products had been gathering dust at home.

If the gift is not chosen well, both the giver and the receiver will feel uncomfortable. Jiang Lai lamented, "We can't buy gifts according to the value system we use when we work outside, but we have to go back to their system. If the gift is beyond the context of their life, it will become a burden."

Giving gifts is troublesome because it is usually a give-and-take thing, but gifts contain emotions and their value cannot be simply calculated. Some people mix comparison and utilitarianism into gift giving, which can easily make gift giving "change its flavor" and turn it into a "debt of favor."

Shuangshuang heard from her mother that when her cousin got married two years ago, the gifts she gave to relatives were not as expensive as those given to her cousin a few years earlier. After comparing, the relatives complained and reminded her that the gifts she prepared should not be worse than those given to her cousin's family. At the same time, because the relatives in her hometown would think that she was working hard in the "big city", buying too little gifts would not only lose face, but also show that she was "not doing well" outside.

Jiang Lai's grandmother would rank the younger generations who came to pay New Year's greetings, and then place their gifts in the next room by family. After all the guests had left, she would discuss with her son and decide on the return gifts based on the amount of gifts given by each family. "Whoever gave more, we should give more in return; whoever gave less gifts this year than last year, we should give less in return."

In order to avoid embarrassment, Mu Yao said that she would keep the price tags when giving gifts to relatives, or give gifts whose prices or brands can be directly checked online. At the same time, for gifts of similar prices, buying a larger box will not appear stingy.

"This gift-giving process is both empty and difficult," explained Lei Lei, who works away from home all year round. The empty part is that the etiquette is cumbersome, but it has to be done. Gifts have strong tool attributes and one gift may be circulated to many families. The difficult part is that I think about my relatives during the New Year and other holidays, but it seems that almost no relatives care about my parents as much as I do.

In order to give "high-quality gifts for humankind", young people who have difficulty in gift giving began to search for answers online. Unexpectedly, the anxious "gift givers" gave various seeding and evaluation bloggers an opportunity to "eat" . According to CBNData data, the seeding and evaluation of short video platform bloggers has a huge impact on the purchase of New Year gifts, and 74% of people prefer to collect information on short video platforms such as Douyin.

Bloggers and brands use Chinese New Year gift giving to promote their products

Almost every year, a new gift-giving trend emerges, bringing a new gift category to the fore. Mu Yao gave an example, in the past two years, more and more people have paid attention to health, and the health care product industry has also begun to use the Chinese New Year gift-giving to promote itself, from New Zealand honey in the past two years, to superfoods last year, to krill oil this year, and the prices are getting higher and higher.

With the marketing of various businesses and bloggers, gift-giving has become even more "competitive". Many emotional accounts often use "gift-giving" as a case to output "emotional intelligence education" on the ways of the world, dividing gift-giving into different levels, which makes young people more anxious about gift-giving.

3. Some young people began to rectify the practice of “gift giving”

The reason why young people worry about gift-giving is that more and more people born in the 1990s and 1995s are taking on the responsibility of managing family relationships.

In the past, I would accompany my parents to give gifts and red envelopes, but now I need to do so on behalf of my parents. In recent years, many young people have begun to realize that they are gradually becoming the main external contact person in the family. "This means that I have grown up and matured, and the burden on me has become heavier," said Lei Lei.

As the younger generation begins to take charge of "family affairs", the necessity of gift-giving and the meaning it represents are also changing.

The reason why gift-giving was so important in the past was that gift-giving formed the initial economic flow. If someone gave a gift worth 100 yuan to your home, you would need to return it with a gift worth 110 yuan or even more, which would generate a "return on investment". At the same time, you would also receive similar returns when you gave gifts to others, and funds would flow with favors.

Nie Huihua, a professor at the School of Economics of Renmin University of China, said that with the development of economic conditions, social security has become relatively complete, the functions of cross-period financing and mutual investment have weakened, and New Year gifts and New Year's money are more used to consolidate interpersonal relationships and networks of relatives and friends.

Nowadays, with the development of urbanization, many young people have moved away from their hometowns and do not live with their parents. They have gradually broken away from the circle of familiar society and established independent "individual islands".

Young people today have a stronger sense of individuality, and their social relationships are also changing dynamically. The willingness and role of maintaining kinship relationships have been greatly reduced, and giving gifts during the Chinese New Year is more like a social constraint. A psychology doctor told Dingjiao that in such a situation, if you add too much financial pressure to yourself in order to meet certain secular expectations, the gains will outweigh the losses.

Many interviewees said that compared with their peers who work in their hometowns, they usually work away from home and rarely visit or contact their relatives. They may not say a word or see them twice a year. Giving gifts is more like repaying favors and continuing friendships on behalf of their parents. At the same time, "giving gifts" is originally about expressing feelings, with gifts first and things second. If giving gifts becomes "thankless" or "mechanical", then the meaning of giving gifts is lost.

On social platforms, many young people with similar mindsets began to comfort each other, saying, "Don't waste time", "Do what you can", and "We can agree not to give or receive anything from each other."

In fact, in some areas, not accepting gifts or visiting relatives during the Spring Festival is becoming a new custom. With mutual understanding among relatives, many people have begun to have meals together to keep in touch, replacing the ineffective social interaction behind the formality of gift-giving.

However, this new custom is currently only popular in small circles. After all, the custom of gift-giving still has a very important meaning in the eyes of the older generation.

After all, this generation of young people still values ​​the emotional connection between people. It’s not that they don’t like giving gifts, but they just don’t want to be kidnapped by gifts without emotion.

Instead of emptying your wallet and racking your brains during the Chinese New Year, it is better to pay more attention to your parents and elders in daily life. Shuangshuang will buy small appliances and health products for his parents, and subsidize some household expenses when necessary. Seeing that his grandmother is old and deaf, he will take the initiative to buy her a hearing aid. "I do all this willingly, and for those who love you, the best Chinese New Year gift is to go home often."

Author: Su Qi, Editor: Jin Yufan

Source: Dingjiaoone (ID: dingjiaoone), deeply influencing innovation.