“FESTIVALS,” to adapt an anthropological adage, “are good to think with.” An especially salient festival like Christmas is abundantly thought-provoking. Take one aspect of behavior at Christmas: gift-giving.
Our culture divides the world into the public and the private. The public is for business, impersonality, contracts, cold reason, politics, officialdom, money and legal obligation. The private is everything the public is not — warm emotional involvement with family and friends, love, the unofficial, the uncalculating. We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.
Original Article: Op-Ed Contributor - Why We ‘Gift’ - NYTimes.com
