The best Christmas gifts don’t come from stores

What’s the best gift you ever received? Whatever it was, it surely wasn’t a material item bought in a store.

An experience, rather than a material good, is the best gift to receive. That’s what University of Toronto professor Cindy Chan and University of California professor Cassie Mogilner discovered in a study they conducted in 2018.

“The reason experiential gifts are more socially connecting is that they tend to be more emotionally evocative,” Chan told PsychCentral. “An experiential gift elicits a strong emotional response when a recipient consumes it – like the fear and awe of a safari adventure, the excitement of a rock concert or the calmness of a spa – and is more intensely emotional than a material possession.”