Conscious gift giving ideas to express gratitude

With Christmas and the holidays approaching, we are officially entering a wonderful time for reflecting over the lived year and expressing gratitude for our loved ones. And this time of the year traditionally comes with making gifts which, as we all know, can be anywhere from a nightmare to a fun treasure hunt for some people. Wherever you fit in this spectrum, I want to ask you a couple of questions:

What if we bought gifts with the intention of providing relief rather than for the sake of buying?

Wouldn’t anyone enjoy receiving a more personalised gift that actually benefited them?

With these ideas in mind, I wanted to dedicate this space to conscious gift giving ideas that anyone, adolescents or adults, can use as inspiration to treat their loved ones this year.

4 Intentional Gift Ideas for the Holidays:

In the era of minimalism movements and valuing experiences over things, one may be tempted to gift experiences without a real purpose behind it. It is important that when we do seek experiences, they are aligned with purpose and in the decision-making process, we take into consideration the impact on our financial health. As gift giving may be seasonal – but the dent it can leave on teens’ finances may take much longer to recover – perhaps even living an emotional dent too.

Third-Culture Teenagers and Money Management

This may be an unspoken subject of conversation in some cultures, but nonetheless a very important one to engage naturally and openly in families: adolescents’ money management.

In my late teens, I became more and more interested in well-being and reading self-help books. The take home message in a lot of these books emphasised on choosing values which support your beliefs and lifestyle. One of my values was intentional spending. And one of the benefits of decluttering our physical space and only holding onto items which mattered was I became intentional about the value of things. And although reducing the number and bulk of physical items did reduce a lot of cognitive load and time spent around how to store, move my extra stuff and I made some money by selling my unwanted items.

I did not hold onto this extra money – I was addicted to keeping up with “cool” experiences. I turned to travelling as my new entertainment. I was privileged with a generous allowance, and I thought that by travelling I would be enriching my life culturally and linguistically, which is not always the motivation for privileged kids in my position. But it wasn’t the frequency of travels nor the diversity of destinations which would bring me more cultural nor linguistical connection – it was becoming very intentional and selective about the culture or subject that I wanted to connect with. It was through my own investigation of books, podcasts, videos and all other sorts of information gathering that I came to the informed choice of spending my money on travelling.

And I am not alone in this. Without a real understanding and critical thinking of why we travel, why we buy and why spend, a lot of privileged third-culture adolescents also grow up without good financial education and can risk developing bad financial habits.

So parents – don’t be afraid to ask your teenagers about their values and their spending choices in the same way that you talk to them about school, mental health or sexuality.

At STELD, we believe that developing good financial habits as a teenager is the basis for financial success in adulthood and plays a pivotal part in keeping optimal mental health.