Christmas shopping is worth stressing over: Anthropologists and sociologists have long believed that ritualized gift exchange is one of the most important mechanisms keeping our fragile social networks intact. The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss hypothesized in his seminal 1925 essay, “The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies," that when an object is given as a gift, it becomes inextricably tied to the giver. “To make a gift of something,” he wrote, “is to make a present of some part of oneself." Mauss identified three obligations associated with gift exchange: giving, which he equates with the first step in building a social relationship; receiving, which signifies acceptance of the social relationship; and reciprocating, which demonstrates the recipient’s integrity. If gifts are refused or unreciprocated, relationships can be threatened.

In 1979, University of Virginia sociologist Theodore Caplow, in keeping with the tradition of a generation of sociologists led by Robert and Helen Lynd, travelled to the small town of Muncie, Indiana—a stand-in for “Middletown, USA”—to study something the Lynds had neglected: the annual exchange of gifts on Christmas, a ritual in which even the most socially isolated residents participate. Caplow interviewed 110 adults on their experience of Christmas the previous year, and from their responses was able to collect data on 366 Christmas gatherings and 4,347 individual gifts. Though he discovered strict rules underlying nearly every aspect of holiday gift-giving—from who gives what to how presents are wrapped—Middletown residents denied the existence of such rules, preferring to envision Christmas gifting as a voluntary, spontaneous demonstration of love and friendship. “Gift exchange,” Caplow concluded, “is a language that employs objects instead of words as its lexical elements…. The language of prestation, like the verbal language, begins to be learned in early childhood and is used with increasing assurance as the individual matures and acquires social understanding.”

He presented his findings in two essays, “Christmas Gifts and Kin Networks," which appeared in American Sociological Review in 1982, and “Rule Enforcement Without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown,” published in American Journal of Sociology in 1984.

Gifts must be given to the right people

"The 110 respondents in the sample gave 2,969 gifts and received 1,378 gifts, a mean of 27 given and 13 received. Participants in this gift system should give (individually or jointly) at least one Christmas gift every year to their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters; to the current spouses of these persons; and to their own spouses. By the operation of this rule, participants expect to receive at least one gift in return from each of these persons excepting infants…Gifts to grandparents and grandchildren seem to be equally obligatory if these live in the same community or nearby, but not at greater distances. Christmas gifts to siblings are not required.

Parents expect to give more valuable and more numerous gifts to their minor children and to their adult children living at home than they receive in return. This imbalance is central to the entire ritual. The iconography of Middletown's secular Christmas emphasizes unreciprocated giving to children by the emblematic figure of Santa Claus, and the theme of unreciprocated giving provides one of the few connections between the secular and religious iconography of the festival-the Three Wise Men coming from a distant land to bring unreciprocated gifts to a child.