Why A Inexpensive Gag Gift Could Be The Best Gift You Have Ever Given Away
Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Ella Nyman in Humor
Coming up with ideas for gifts can be very hard sometimes. Especially if it is for people you don’t know too well, so you have no idea of their interests and what they might consider practical and useful. In this situation many people would start looking for something that will appeal to themselves, which can be completely opposite from what the recipient might enjoy.
If you think about it, what you consider practical, is probably completely useless for somebody else. My grandma received a bunch of cooking stuff on her birthday from my mother, because they both like to cook. I too usually receive cookbooks and similar kitchen stuff from them on my birthday. Are cookbooks practical for me? Not really, unless you count that I give them away to other people on their birthdays.
In modern western society most adult people already own everything they might want or need. The only thing that remains are those that they cannot afford like a sports motorcycle, a trip around the world or a yacht. But those gifts are completely unrealistic for most of us.
So if we ruled out practical gifts, what is left? Gifts that invoke some kind of memory or positive emotion. This is why souvenirs are so popular even though they often are cheesy, pointless or even plain ugly. They invoke the memories from the trip. In the same way a nicely framed picture you got from your partner might invoke happiness every time you see it.
This is where the often overlooked gag gift or prank gift comes in. Happiness and laughter is the most positive emotion we can experience, and gag gifts are often designed just to make us laugh. Even if people wont remember the specific gift very long they will remember the feeling it invoked in them. The fun at a 50th birthday party might be remembered for the rest of this persons life, but will he remember all the junk he got? Probably not.
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