With the holiday season rapidly approaching, gift giving is on many people’s minds. Sometimes, figuring out what to give someone as a present can be really challenging! What do you get for that special someone to show you really care or the person who already has everything? Why not give them an experience. Tickets to a concert they love, admission to a museum they’ve always wanted to visit, a cooking class to sharpen their skills or you could even cover the cost of an excursion on an upcoming trip. Gifting experiences instead of physical items is meaningful, surprising, and often much more impactful. Over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences not only bring people more happiness than possessions, but this happiness actually lasts longer.
One of the other great parts about experience gifts is waiting for them. Just as you get excited before going on a vacation, the anticipation is part of the thrill. A 2014 study published in Psychological Science found that one of the biggest advantages of experiential gifts is that they start garnering you happiness before they even actually “happen,” in the form of pleasant anticipation. Not only do you get excited to unwrap a gift but you get to relive that excitement and anticipation every day until the experience actually happens!
As our children have gotten older we’ve started to present the idea of experiences as gifts over physical items and they love it! In reality how many Lego or craft kits does a child really need? Fortunately for our family, we take our big vacations in the winter and we all have late fall and winter birthdays, providing the perfect opportunity to include these experience gifts in our travels. Since we’re a family of five, travel costs and extras add up fairly quickly. Even though we do partake in many activities while traveling, we need to pick and choose and we can’t all do everything thus leaving many opportunities for individual experience gifts.
Experience gifts have worked out great for our family – especially for our risk taker teenage son. He’s gotten to choose some really cool adventurous activities that wouldn’t work or be enjoyed by all family members. He’s gone ziplining in New Hampshire and Canada, rented a jet ski in St. Maarten and parasailed in Jamaica, among other things. All activities that fit his adventurous personality! He has thoroughly enjoyed his choices and may not have had a chance to experience them otherwise. He’s returned home from vacation with extra stories to tell and memories to last a lifetime.
Besides gifts, our children have learned to choose experiences for themselves over physical items as their vacation souvenirs. Destination t-shirts and collectibles are great but how many do you really need? On a trip to Paris our older daughter chose to use her souvenir money to have the family ride a giant ferris wheel (we paid our portion), something we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise but it was lots of fun and a great experience. In Cozumel, while walking through town we came across a booth where people were getting fish pedicures. They sat with their feet in large fish tanks and the fish ate the dead skin off. So random, but our son thought it was great, so his souvenir was 15 minutes of fish nibbling on his feet. Definitely something different that he’ll always remember!
I totally understand that you want to have a physical gift to present and it’s fun to have that big fancy wrapped package to give someone. Fortunately, sometimes the best gifts come in small packages. You can make or buy a card or small gift box to present your unique gift experience in. Maybe just for fun, place the gift card, printed certificate, or even a handwritten note explaining the idea in a large box just to throw the recipient off.
Although physical gifts may be fun to give, I personally believe individuals get more value from experiences overall. People tend to eventually get bored or tired of physical gifts, but they’ll always value the memories of an experience. While physical gifts may technically last “longer” than experiences timewise, the powerful, happy memories and stories created during gift experiences can truly last a lifetime!
