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Regift: (verb) To give an unwanted gift to someone else; to give as a gift something one previously received as a gift. – Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English, Preview Edition
My partner and I recently received a lovely hostess gift and after realizing – what it was and where it came from – I said, “Don’t unwrap it. That will be perfect for so-and-so.” I can’t actually describe the gift or name the so-and-so, because you can bet I’ll be regifting it this year. Yes, I’m a regifter. There, I said it. I even have a gift drawer. Doesn’t everyone?
According to Regiftable.com, two out of three people have either regifted or are considering regifting. The Los Angeles Times explained its origin:
Regifting -- a word whose derivation has been traced to a 1995 “Seinfeld” episode -- is emerging from the closet. Although experts don’t know when the practice started, it’s probably as old as gift-giving itself. These days it’s more popular than ever.
Some attribute the renewed interest to the economy and people’s desire to recycle. All great reasons: save money and save the planet. But is there an art to regrifting? Nora Dunn at Wise Bread suggests that you remember who gave you the gift in the first place:
True story: It’s my second Christmas with my ex’s family. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, hadn’t quite figured me out in terms of what to buy for me, and since the relationship was still kind of new, we were both unclear as to what types of gifts we should get for each other. For our first Christmas, I got her…you guessed it…soap. (Everybody can use soap, right)? Guess what I got back the next year? That very same raspberry foam soap that I had given her the previous year. And I know that this was a re-gift, because she never would have been able to buy the same soap that second year; the store went out of business!
So…re-gift at your own risk. It’s a big bad world of soap out there.
Ricemutt at Experiments in Finance offers a world view on the topic:
I’m all for being frugal but still somewhat constrained by my culture, I guess. In my family, especially in Asia, gift-giving is not as casual as it is here in the States. Gift giving there has a lot more significance, and people understand the amount of thought that was probably put into the present: its price, its quality, its brand, the country where it was made, even sometimes its accessibility (e.g. how difficult it would be to find).
Thriftiness and frugality are important elsewhere in life, but just not when it comes to gift giving or hosting. And when someone who’s given you a gift visits your house, the most respectful thing to do is to have the gift prominently displayed somewhere that they can see it. I can imagine that if a person were to find out that his or her gift had been passed on to someone else, it would be both an insult and a reason for relationships between parties to break.
I guess I wouldn’t assimilate too well in Tokyo. Call me a shabby American. That said, I typically only regift hostess gifts. After all, what am I supposed to do with all those candles, Christmas plates, decorative soaps, and boxes of See Candies? Shouldn’t I pass them on? Of course! That seems like a no-brainer. I can now even regift for charity.
But what about higher ticket items? For example, I still have unused gift cards. Is it okay then to wrap up that $25 iTunes card and give it to my sister’s stepson? Or is that tacky even though he would probably love it.
On a post over at My Open Wallet, a commenter named Sandy asked:
What’s wrong with regifting, if the regift is the perfect gift? If we really believe what we say, that it’s the thought that counts, then it counts whether you bought the gift in the first place, or just figured out who is the perfect recipient. For my birthday one year, my sister gave me a pair of vintage earrings that had originally been given to her. She doesn’t feel comfortable wearing clips, I wear clips only. My sister would never wear the earrings; I wear them all the time, they make me feel like a million bucks, and it made me happy that my sister thought to give them to me. The regifting didn’t offend me, and
