Sally Feldman unwraps the complexity of the Christmas present

Any day now quite a few churlish readers are going to start their annual round of muttering. Just as the world is transforming itself into a wonderland of cascading tinsel, cherubs and illuminated trees, some humanist somewhere is sure to have begun ranting about the pointless vulgarity of it all. You won't catch one of these intellectual purists giving in to seasonal pressures. Not for them the gold wrapping paper, brandy-soaked apricots, David Beckham boxers, marzipan fruit cakes and overpriced port with slivers of stilton. And certainly not for them the absurd ritual of sending cards to people they see every day at work anyway or, even more absurdly, people they energetically avoid for the rest of the year.
But while you are proudly eschewing the annual orgy of giving and receiving, wasting and squandering, you may not be aware of the psychic darkness lurking behind your smug disapproval. If you don't allow yourself to join in the festive bout of bonding and binding you are turning your back on one of mankind's most fundamental vehicles of societal affirmation. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas puts it: "By ignoring the universal custom of compulsory gifts we make our own record incomprehensible to ourselves: right across the globe and as far back as we can go in the history of human civilisation, the major transfer of goods has been by cycles of obligatory returns of gifts."
It could be that your revulsion at Christmas may have less to do with your atheism than with a fear of revealing too much about yourself. In his seminal work The Gift, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, observes: "To make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself." Or, as a philosopher boyfriend once remarked as he unwrapped my favourite novel of the moment, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook: "All gifts are propaganda."
... A recent survey revealed that houses up and down the land are heaving with countless electrical gadgets which somehow no one can bring themselves to give away. These are the safe option when it comes to gifts. How could you go wrong with a breadmaker or fondue set? There are no difficult aesthetic considerations, unless you're fussy about the very idea of sharing a mess of melted cheese, or the floury taste of underdone sundried tomato loaf. They provide both novelty and thoughtfulness, a perfectly balanced mix of the original and the practical.
Where the yogurt maker and the knife sharpener, the cappuccino frother and the soda streamer really come into their own, of course, is the wedding present. You won't be judged, you won't have to risk betraying your outré choices in chinaware. The gadget is the answer to a thousand taste problems, and the more gifts we need to buy the more ingenious the new wares.
All those inventors, thinking up ever more unnecessary ways to perform faster a myriad tasks we never even dreamed of attempting before—you may write it off as another obscene capitalist trick to create what no one wants. A more benevolent interpretation is that the fad for gadgets is a 21st century form of gift economy, not unlike those of more primitive peoples.
In the potlatches of the Chinook, Nootka, and other Pacific Northwest peoples, for example ...
... I'm ... taken by the gifts bestowed on the precious princess by her fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty. One granted her beauty, another modesty, a third grace, a fourth a lovely singing voice. Only the wicked fairy spoiled the banquet, if you recall. Furious at having been left off the guest list, she arrived in a thunderbolt and pronounced her terrible curse of death by spinning wheel.
Humanists perplexed at what to give at Christmas when in fact we don't feel we should celebrate Christmas at all might take comfort from this splendid tradition. Forget the nutcrackers and the silver nose clippers, the balloon flight or the pilot lessons. Give instead something truly cerebral. You could offer the gifts of scepticism, passion, moral anxiety, wisdom, hope. And irony. Just choose an extremely clever and aggressively stylish card. And send it with a year's subscription to the New Humanist. Parents, Presents and Propaganda

... Cillian Murphy, actor

What, if anything, will you be celebrating this Christmas?
For me Christmas is a celebration of family. It tends to be the only holiday when everyone makes the effort to eat together, give gifts and fight with their siblings. Not being religious means while I am aware of the symbolism, I find the general feeling of goodwill, generosity and refection (sic) more important.
What is the best/worst gift you've ever received?
I'm not a terribly organised person. A couple of years ago my parents gave me a filing cabinet. I think that says it all.
What is the best/worst gift you've ever given?
I remember being a broke student and giving my brother a lottery ticket in one of those little lottery-produced Christmas cards. I think he got two stars. Which is lottery for nothing. I gave my dad who is a genuine handyman a leatherman tool which he loves and still wears on his belt today.
"All gifts are propaganda". True or false?
Obviously the advertising is too much, and I think the biggest victims are young kids who get given so much that nothing remains special or unique to them. This was summed up best in an episode of The Simpsons when Homer comes into money and gives Maggie this elaborate gift and Maggie promptly discards it and begins playing happily with the bubblewrap.