Today's Wisdom - Christmas Special

Happy holidays from the team at A Little Wiser!

We hope you’re enjoying a restful festive break. Today, we’re pivoting from our usual schedule to bring you a few Christmas-inspired lessons. We’re offline this Wednesday (Christmas Eve), but look out for our next edition returning on Friday. Today’s wisdom:

Let’s dive in. 🦌🛷

Every holiday season, birthdays included, a familiar pressure sets in: the hunt for the perfect gift. Psychologists call this “gifting anxiety,” and it turns out to be less about generosity and more about misaligned expectations. Studies consistently show that givers and receivers value different things. Givers tend to overestimate how much the gift reflects their thoughtfulness or creativity, while receivers care more about how useful or meaningful the gift will be in their everyday lives. This gap explains why so many well-intentioned presents land somewhere between polite gratitude and quiet disappointment.

Behavioral economics offers a neat explanation through something called the focusing illusion. When choosing a gift, givers fixate on the moment of exchange: the unwrapping, the smile, the imagined “wow.” Receivers, however, rarely replay that moment. Their satisfaction depends on what happens afterward and how often the item gets used, whether it fits into their routines, or if it quietly gathers dust. In one experiment, gift-givers consistently predicted higher happiness from “impressive” gifts, while recipients reported greater satisfaction with practical or familiar ones. The mismatch is a cognitive bias that pulls attention toward the wrong moment in time.

The good news is that research also points to a way out. Studies from social psychology show that experience-based gifts like concert tickets, shared meals, trips, or classes tend to create stronger and longer-lasting happiness than physical objects. Experiences are harder to compare, less likely to trigger regret, and more tightly linked to social connection. Even without something to unwrap, they generate stories, memories, and shared meaning. The wiser takeaway is counterintuitive: the best gifts aren’t always the most impressive ones. They’re the ones that continue to live in someone’s life long after the wrapping paper is gone.

Every December, alongside festive playlists and shopping lists, a curious economic report quietly appears: the Christmas Price Index. Since 1984, economists at PNC Bank have calculated the total cost of all the gifts mentioned in ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’ from a partridge in a pear tree to twelve drummers drumming. It sounds like seasonal whimsy, but beneath the novelty is a serious economic exercise. The index functions as a miniature “basket of goods,” much like the Consumer Price Index (CPI), tracking commodities, precious metals, animals, and labor. Five gold rings reflect global gold prices. Six geese a-laying track livestock costs. Ten lords-a-leaping and eight maids-a-milking stand in for skilled and unskilled labor. Over time, this musical shopping list has become an unexpectedly useful mirror of real-world inflation.

What the index reveals is striking. Physical goods like the partridge, the pear tree, and even the swans, have remained relatively stable in price over decades, benefiting from globalization, supply chains, and agricultural efficiency. Labor, however, has exploded in cost. Since the 1980s, the price of hiring performers like pipers, drummers, and dancers has risen by more than 300%. In 2025 alone, the index jumped roughly 4.5%, driven not by birds but by people: higher wages for live performers and a surge in gold prices. We have become exceptionally good at producing “things” cheaply, but human skill, presence, and artistry remain stubbornly expensive.

Economists have a name for this pattern: Baumol’s Cost Disease. A piper piping today is no more productive than one in 1700 as he still plays one flute, one song at a time. Yet his wages must rise to compete with jobs in sectors where productivity has soared, like technology or finance. The Christmas Price Index makes this abstract idea tangible. When you see the cost of maids and lords dwarfing the price of geese and trees, you’re witnessing a deep economic truth: efficiency lowers the cost of goods, but the human touch resists automation. In the long run, what we value most like care, creativity and performance will also be what costs the most.

Every December, millions of Christmas trees stand proudly in frozen living rooms, snowy town squares, and subzero forests. Their needles intact, branches flexible as they are very much alive. Put a rose bush or a houseplant through the same winter conditions and it would collapse within days. The difference is in a remarkable biological strategy refined over millions of winters. Evergreen conifers like firs, spruces, and pines evolved specifically for cold, dark seasons when growth is impossible and survival is everything. While most plants retreat underground or die back, Christmas trees stay standing, photosynthesis-ready, waiting patiently for spring.

The secret lies in how they handle freezing temperatures. When water freezes inside a cell, it expands and forms sharp ice crystals that rupture cell walls; essentially microscopic shrapnel. Conifers avoid this through a process called extracellular freezing. As temperatures drop, evergreen cells actively move water out of their interiors into the spaces between cells. Ice forms there instead, safely away from delicate structures. At the same time, the cells flood themselves with concentrated sugars and proteins that act as a natural antifreeze, lowering the freezing point of what little water remains. The needles themselves help too: their narrow shape, waxy coating, and thick cell walls reduce water loss and wind damage, while their dark green color absorbs precious winter sunlight. What looks like stillness is actually careful biochemical control.

There’s a quiet lesson hidden in every Christmas tree we decorate. Evergreens survive winter not by resisting it head-on, but through strategic retreat. In temporarily giving up internal resources to protect what truly matters, they slow growth, shed vulnerability, and preserve structure until conditions improve. In human terms, it’s a reminder that resilience isn’t always about pushing harder. Sometimes it’s about conserving energy, simplifying, and safeguarding the core while the season is harsh.

We hope you enjoyed today’s edition. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and helping A Little Wiser reach new people every week. Have a lovely Christmas, see you on Friday!

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