The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my family’s Selfish Gift Exchange tradition that we do every Christmas.  Okay — I’ve found that most extended families eventually come to a point where it doesn’t make sense for every person to give every other person a holiday gift. When you get to this point of family reckoning, there are generally 3 ways to handle it: 1) you stop giving gifts altogether, 2) you pool money for a group charitable contribution or 3) you draw names so that each person gives to just one other person.  My family started out doing #3 — drawing names. The problem was, we were not seeing some of my more geographically distant cousins enough to make even an educated guess about what they liked so — we were either giving complete dud gifts OR playing it totally safe and just exchanging gift cards.  There is nothing that feels more pointless than swapping $30 gift cards. Why even b...