Joy to the World: Seneca on the Mutual Pleasure of Gift-Giving

For many in the West—at least in a “normal” year—October signals the start of Christmas planning. For me, however, the realization that Christmas is now less than three months away has taken me completely by surprise this year. With all the chaos 2020 has brought, the fact that the Christmas season is coming once again—just as it always has—brings me both incredible comfort and, to be honest, further anxiety. 

For so many, including myself, Christmas is going to look very different from the Christmases of previous years. Travel restrictions, health concerns, and political instability have left many of us dreading the approach of a holiday season away from those we love or in fear for their health and wellbeing. Christmas this year will undoubtedly be a season in which we must purposefully strive for that “joy to the world” which in so many other years we may have taken for granted. 

To the extra anxieties of this Christmas season are added the normal holiday stressors, especially the often fraught process of planning, choosing, making, buying, wrapping, giving, receiving, exchanging, and sometimes returning Christmas gifts. Most of us enjoy the act of giving or receiving a gift in the moment, but that does not mean that the process of deciding to whom we must give a gift this season and what precisely we must give them is easy. About this time every year, I begin to be filled with dread as I anticipate the process of planning and selecting that perfect item for each and every member of my list of recipients—which often begins optimistically long but inevitably shrinks over the course of the next two months to include only my closest family members and friends. 

The Death of Seneca by Peter Paul Rubens

This year, however, I’ve decided to take a new approach to Christmas gift-giving—one inspired by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, whose treatise On Benefits I have spent a lot of time with while working on my doctoral thesis. Looking to a Roman philosopher for advice on Christmas gift-giving might sound rather anachronistic, but most scholars agree that the origins of Christmas gift-giving actually reach back to the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was celebrated for hundreds of years before the birth of Christ with public festivities and a rich cultural tradition of private gift-giving.

Seneca begins his treatise by complaining about how badly people give and receive gifts and favors. People give gifts so often out of a sense of mere obligation—or in order to create one! You gave me a $20 Chili’s gift card last year, so this year I feel I have to buy you at least $20 worth of Target knickknacks. Or maybe I’m sick of Tex-Mex, so I get you an Olive Garden gift card this year in hopes that you’ll get the hint for next year.

All of us sense that this isn’t how gift-giving is supposed to work. Something is off when we use gifts as a power play, whether to create a sense of obligation in someone else or to avoid feeling indebted to others ourselves. The truth is, gifts by their very nature require some surplus of cash, time, or other resource(s) on the part of a would-be giver. For this reason, gift-giving serves as a powerful social symbol of wealth or status. C. S. Lewis makes the point memorably in his complaint about the expectations surrounding Christmas cards in his satirical essay “Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus”:

Because all men must send these cards the marketplace is filled with the crowd of those buying them, so that there is great labour and weariness. But having bought as many as they suppose to be sufficient, they return to their houses and find there the like cards which others have sent to them. And when they find cards from any to whom they also have sent cards, they throw them away and give thanks to the gods that this labour at least is over for another year. But when they find cards from any to whom they have not sent, then they beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain and buy a card for him also.

Sound familiar? Seneca repeats a similar complaint in On Benefits, when the imagined interlocutor of his essay insists that gifts always create an obligation of return. No matter how grateful or ungrateful one feels for a gift he has received, he absolutely must give back to his initial benefactor a gift of equal value:

But the one who receives a gift, no matter how graciously he has received it, has not yet completed all his duty; for it still needs to be returned.

From our modern perspective, we might expect Seneca to respond to this Scrooge-like objection to gift-giving by insisting on the concept of a “free” or “pure” gift. We have inherited the idea from Western interpretations of Christianity (specifically from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida) that a gift is only a true gift when it is given without expectation of return. The kind of gift that Seneca’s interlocutor describes does not sound to us like a gift at all.

However, this is not the response that Seneca offers. To the giver, he does insist that the purpose of a gift cannot be simply to receive something in exchange: “otherwise it was not a gift but a transaction.” The intention of a gift, according to Seneca, is A) to give usefulness and pleasure to the recipient and B) to share “mutual pleasure” in the recipient’s recognition of that good-willed intention. This second part of Seneca’s definition is what we often miss when we try to rectify transactional approaches to gift-giving by replacing them with a Derridean notion of the “free gift”—which, we should note, in Derrida’s own theory, is, at least in its purest sense, impossible.

Across the whole of his treatise on gifts, Seneca argues that the true purpose of gift-giving is to foster good relationships by means of good-willed acts that go beyond what is obligatory to the relationship. By this he means that showing up to work on time is not an act of generosity towards one’s boss, but volunteering to stay late without overtime to help meet a deadline might be. Showing respect to one’s parents is obligatory; giving mom flowers on Mother’s Day goes a step beyond what is strictly necessary (though this does depend on your particular family dynamic!). 

What are we to do when we feel the weight of others’ expectations on our own gift-giving? Seneca calls for some introspection. In the picture he paints, both gift-giving and gratitude are acts of response to another human being qua human being. So, on the one hand, we must carefully consider what our duties are in any individual relationship. On the other hand, we should not confuse the picture by calling the fulfillment of duty a “gift” or “favor.” And—we should note—we are never obligated to accept a so-called gift if it is given without our best interest at heart.

What does all this mean for my preparations for Christmas this year? In sum, my aim is to worry as little as possible about precisely what gifts I have received from others in the past and what kinds of gifts they might expect or hope for from me this year. Instead, my goal in this pre-Christmas season is to give some time to reflecting on the state of the various relationships I find myself in, and to give thanks for all the good I have received from each of them over the course of this chaotic and turbulent year. Then, I’m going to ask myself what kind of service, gift, or message of love I might offer in each individual case as a means of acknowledging the particular joy that relationship brings me and going one step beyond the duty I owe to that person as a friend, daughter, sister, wife, etc. My goal is to foster a little more joy in my world this year, as I purposefully share in the “mutual pleasure” of the goodwill that I hope will characterize this coming Christmas season.