To ask if anyone actually like 'token gifts'

[Bearbehind]

Inspired by a thread in the Christmas section about family limiting adult gifts to £10.

If you had a choice between receiving say 5 gifts at £10 or 1 at £50 which would you prefer?

I literally can't think of 5 things that cost £10 that I'd buy for myself let alone for other people.

People are always going on about waste, especially at Christmas and I just can't my head around why you'd do this.

I'd rather have nothing that 5 bits of tat I'll probably never use.

Does anyone actually like 'token gifts'?

It depends really.
Some of the token gifts I've been given have been my favourite. It's definitely the thought that goes into it rather than the price tag.

Sorry to harp on, but I agree £10 is plenty for a gift - I say that because the idea of someone spending 50 quid makes me cringe. Unless the person knows you very well, it's probably going to be something you can't even get rid of easily! At least if a ten pound bottle of wine isn't to your taste, it doesn't matter.

But I think the key thing with token gifts is that, even with tokens, some people are more thoughtless than others. It works best if everyone either does family wishlists, or is talkative about what they might like. Otherwise you end up doing what a certain family member of mine does - buying a random selection of shite then handing you something. 'Oh, you already have it? I bought it you two years ago? Ok, then, erm, mum, you swap with LRD, you'll enjoy this. You don't? Oh.'

You do actually have to put a bit of thought into tokens or they just become junk.

TBH the £50 gift options isn't really the point, it's more the buying a small gift for the sake of it when it isn't tailored to the persons wants or likes.

Well there you go then. The problem isn't the cost of the present but the fact that not a lot of thought has gone into it. An expensive but thoughtless present is no better, and in fact - for me at least - much more embarrassing to receive.

getting someone 1 eyeshadow, even if it's what they want, doesn't look much so the tendency is to go for a bigger but cheaper set
This is the problem. With a small budget people don’t want to buy anything decent because “it doesn’t look enough”. So they buy a big piece of tat instead.

None of us give 'tat' presents. I gave my db a Harry Potter mug
I’d regard that as tat though. My mugs are a matching set of plain black china by Royal Doulton. I wouldn’t want a cheap earthenware mug with children’s characters printed on it. I suppose people have different opinions about what is tat.

I'd rather have a £10 cheap consumable, like flowers or coffee. If got enough 'stuff' no more.

I love £10 gifts. I don't often buy myself nice new socks or tights (just less nice ones from sains) or makeup or a candle. Because money is relatively tight and i normally think that i can go without. So i love receiving these things.
More expensive things I might save up for myself if i really need them and so buy very infrequently. But I would buy them myself more often than £10 things.

January is an expensive month. The token wine, cheese, chocolates, shower gels are most welcome.

I don't like tat, clutter. I have family members that hoard - they overspend so much that they couldn't pay the mortgage, & had to move. They filled a skip, plus numerous trips to the dump, local charity shops etc, before they left. "Token gifts", to me, represent waste, consumerism, & placing value on the wrong things in life.

i like little gifts :). im a big fan of barry m nail polish (around £3 a bottle) so those would be nice, or chocolate. on christmas i get more excited about the stocking DH/MIL makes for me rather than the big gifts. Plus usually if someone is spending £50+ its something i want and have asked for. someone spending £5/£10 would be a nice surprise.

For the more expensive gift I was thinking of people pooling their money to get something they know the receiver would like, like the TV example above.

It's interesting because the consensus is that token gifts are fine if they are practical but I think a lot of the time people shy away from practical in order to be 'different' but that's when it becomes tat.

Book
CD
Lipstick
Scarf
Wine
Plant
Candle

Can think of plenty!

Wouldn't have occurred to me to think of a £10 gift as a "token" gift, tbh. Just a gift.

I agree.

It does depend on what the thing is. A friend sent me a pair of socks with a Russian doll print for my last birthday. They cost, I'd guess, £5–£7. I love them. If someone gave me, say, a Boots shower gift set, I probably wouldn't like it as much because it seems less thoughtful/personal. However, I'd still be grateful and I'd use it.

I like token consumable gifts.

I wish my fiance were a bit better at gift giving though - I give him all sorts of hints to outright 'I would like this thing please', but he ends up panicking and WANTING to be the sort of person who can come up with great gifts on his own. But instead of commiting to one great £50 gift, he sort of panics and gets me 8 pieces of tat, usually with some very generic gifts included.

Mulled wine sets (my friend got me one the year before), bath bombs (his aunt and uncle got me those too...), cat shaped rubbers (...?), expensive chocolates (expensive ones push the edge of my dark chocolate intolerance). Not horrible things, and yes, I like those things, but you'd think that someone who lives with you could come up with something better!

I love him to pieces but this is very very much not one of his strengths.

A consumable £10 gift is fine, something that will get used rather than tat and clutter.

Pp have mentioned things like CDs and DVDs, those would be useless to us, we don’t own a cd or DVD player. I don’t know many people who do have a CD player actually except in their cars.

There are lots of small gifts I'd be very happy to have (chocs, particular toiletries, books). Generally there isn't something of the £50 value I'd want - or if there was I'd want to pick it/buy it myself.

I'm also much happier to get a £5 gift that isn't quite what I want than a £50 gift which I'm not that keen on but feel obliged to use because the giver has spent a load of money!

To the poster up thread buying the crate of wine to give out. Why bother? That is thoughtless token gift to me. Everyone gets the same because it's convenient to you. Its irrelevant how good or expensive the wine is - I don't like wine. My mum only drinks sherry. My brother has stopped drinking. Where is the personal touch in a crate of wine?

A book token for up to a tenner, definitely (but don't try buying me a book as you'll either get something I've got or something I don't want). Chocolates, wine, smelly stuff - no thanks. I barely drink, don't eat most chocolates, and don't use most smelly stuff (and have plenty of shampoo and shower gel that I like). I'd rather you gave me a card and wrote something nice in it. Or gave a tenner to charity. Or said 'RangeRider, instead of buying you something I bought myself a book on autism so that I have a better understanding of how your brain works so I can be a better friend. Now I understand that you don't like me changing plans at the last minute!'

A £50 gift is more likely to go wrong in my opinion, unless you're buying off a list. You can easily find a nice handcream, novel, pair of socks, box of chocolates etc for a tenner, and it doesn't really matter if it's not exactly what you'd buy yourself.

Stuff worth £50 is more likely to be clothes, homeware etc which I'd rather choose myself to make sure it's exactly what I want.

The problem with lowish price limits is this idea that something doesn't look enough - I'd rather have one good quality eye shadow than a cheap palette, for example. Similarly, if there's a £10 limit I wouldn't be fussing about what happened to the remaining £2.01 if I received a book worth £7.99. If it's an agreed strategy among friends/family I think I'd bring up the idea of choosing 'one nice gift' beforehand; if it's work secret santa then I wouldn't bother.

I do. I love a potted cyclamen, orchid or amaryllis at Christmas. Or a paperback book. Or a nice new notebook. DSis and I love small gifts so much that we do stockings of them instead of a big present. It;s a highlight of christmas, meeitng up with my sister and opening them.

I love cheap tat- specially Harry Potter stuff from Primark. Also a big fan of mass market thrillers with “The Girl” somewhere in the title. Alcohol is never unwanted either.

Don’t like bubble bath tho. And I probably wouldn’t speak to anyone ever again if they gave me marzipan.

I'd rather have a bottle of wine from people who don't know me well - actually I'd rather have nothing. People never buy me something I'd really like - when I want something, I spend a lot of time looking for the thing I like best - I really don't like people choosing for me. The dcs usually buy me a mug or a cookbook, I love and use both - dh buys me nothing and that's the way I like it.

I’d rather one big gift that I like. We tried to do this as a secret Santa in my exes family years ago. I got a telly for the kitchen, MIL got a decent camera etc. Stupid BIL hated it so the next year we were back to utter tat and shit as well as elderly PIL having to buy a load of presents.

I love all token gifts, with the exception of bath/skin/make up stuff....but people never seem to get them for me.

I would love

A candle,
Flowers
A bottle of wine/prosecco
A nice box of chocolates
A paperback
Some posh biscuits
A pair of ordinary gloves in a nice colour
A nice notebook

Seriously people can take 5 minutes and £10 to choose me a gift and I'm very happy.

To be far by token gifts I think OP means something generic that is bought just because you have to bring a gift. (e.g. a bath set that might not be the kind of thing you'd actually ever use). I do dislike these kind of gifts because they take up space and are bad for the environment. I can imagine it being particularly frustrating if you keep to a tight budget and you end up with £50 worth of tat from family that could have been replaced with one item you desperately want.

I think it's fun to receive a pair of socks, some smellies, candles, post-it notes, stationary - plenty of non-tat things you can get for a tenner, and I find it fun to pick things out for people.