Santa Claus is still a woman

THE first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, specifically, women trying to help each other figure out how best to navigate the task of choosing them. It is a mark of your columnist’s slow wits, then, that after 20 years of writing columns about the economics of Christmas, he has only just noticed the connection between Christmas gifts and women.

The classic study of this topic was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1990 by Eileen Fischer and Stephen Arnold. Fischer and Arnold interviewed almost 300 people about their seasonal gift-giving attitudes and behaviours. Many men refused to answer, suggesting that they didn’t know anything about the subject and that the researchers really should interview their wives instead.

The men who did answer the questions were presumably more progressive than those who refused, but even so the results were stark: women bought gifts for a larger number of people (more than half as many again) and started shopping earlier.