What Gift Is the Universe Wrapping for You?

December did not invent the presents

Midwinter gift giving in Europe predates the Christmas version by a long way. The Roman festival of Saturnalia, held in mid December, involved small wax candles and cheap clay figurines called sigillaria exchanged between households, along with an enthusiastic suspension of normal rules. Separately, Romans marked the New Year with strenae, gifts that began as sprigs of greenery from a sacred grove and ended up as coins and sweets. The French word for New Year gifts still descends from it.

For centuries afterwards, the English speaking world gave presents at New Year rather than on Christmas Day. The shift to the twenty-fifth is largely a nineteenth century affair, driven by a new emphasis on the family Christmas, the popularity of the St Nicholas legend in which a bishop of Myra secretly provides dowries by night and unintentionally invents the hung stocking, and a rapidly industrialising retail trade. The first commercial Christmas card was printed in 1843, commissioned by Henry Cole and drawn by John Callcott Horsley, and it sold indifferently.

The economists have opinions, and so does Sweden

In 1993 the economist Joel Waldfogel published a paper with the marvellously unfestive title The Deadweight Loss of Christmas, in which he asked students to value the gifts they had received and compared the figure to what those gifts had cost. Recipients consistently valued them below the price paid, by something in the region of a tenth to a third. The conclusion, taken narrowly, is that giving people things they did not choose destroys value.

The obvious rebuttal is that nobody gives presents to maximise utility. A gift carries information about how well you know someone, it licenses purchases nobody would justify for themselves, and the awkward ones are frequently the ones remembered longest. Swedish tradition preserves the point neatly in the word julklapp, literally Yule knock, from an older custom of hammering on a door, hurling in a wrapped parcel with a rhyme attached and running away before anyone could thank you.

The gift this quiz hands you is a wish rather than a forecast. Enjoy it, and then go and be slightly inefficient with somebody you like.

How this one works: the name you type is turned into a number, and that number picks one of the outcomes below. It is a party trick rather than a reading — the fun is in which one you land on, not in it being true.