Wrapped up: A present-buying contract is a wise way to forestall Yuletide grief
(Picture: Alamy Stock Photo)Martin Lewis, our very own archangel Gabriel, is right: we need to rethink how we do Christmas. The money expert has implored people to stop buying presents for an “ever-growing list of teachers, friends and extended family,” and to “sign-up to a ‘pre-nup’ which is a pre-Christmas, no unnecessary presents pact.”
The cost-of-living crisis may be a good excuse to reassess our festive habits. Not people in poverty, who may struggle to make it through the winter having been trapped inside the fantastical budgetary tales of Sunak and Hunt, the Brothers Grimm. I’m talking about those of us who usually treat Christmas as a blowout, an orgy of gifts, booze and food to relieve silently raging middle-class malaise.
For couples in long-term relationships, the years spent watching each other treat fungal infections makes the concept of child-like festive wonder a bit redundant, particularly when you have actual children who put bank transfers onto their GoHenry cards on their Christmas lists. Surely couples buying presents for each other must be abandoned entirely.
Isn’t your love gift enough? In my case, no it isn’t — it’s hardly Christmas Day every day with me, more like Mental Health Awareness Day — which means precautions must be taken against any disappointment in the form of Lewis’s pre-nup. I am currently thrashing out a formal agreement with my partner stating that neither party will buy so much as a piece of coal for the other. If this pact is broken in some sentimental moment of weakness in Tesco’s on Christmas Eve, it could well mean a sulk until the New Year.
The sincerity of the contract is critical. In a previous year, my “don’t buy me anything” tough guy insouciance resulted in my partner not actually buying me anything, which smashed my little heart in a devastating way that I hadn’t felt since my parents snubbed my request for Mr Frosty in Christmas 1985.
In this sense — and we are clutching at straws here — the financial crisis may produce a new stripped-back approach to festivities that will curtail unseemly greed and the detritus of ‘Sport’ aftershave bottles. I firmly believe pre-nups will help couples concentrate on what really matters at Christmas: TV.
