#8: Intrinsically Motivated Holidays

Experiences + Things

What do you do when Jesus Christ’s birthday is just a month away?

What I do is search for “intrinsic motivation” + Christmas on Google Scholar, where I found a small 2002 study by psychology researchers Ken Sheldon and Tim Kasser¹, titled “What makes for a Merry Christmas?”. It says:

“Materialistic strivings also involve more stressful experiences (going to the mall is generally more stressful than going to church) and provide fewer chances for intrinsic motivation and flow (wrapping presents generally yields fewer inherent rewards than spending time playing games or conversing with family). Simply said, a focus on materialism, while perhaps beneficial for the economy, distracts people from the ‘true meaning’ of the season.”

(Right! Though I do intrinsically enjoy wrapping presents 🎁)

Our almost-5-year-old son said he’d like to get a tree, make decorations, and receive a surprise gift. Which isn’t as obvious as it sounds, because where we live Christmas trees aren’t the norm and there is no Santa Claus² either.

We did get a tree and made decorations last year. I gather that he had a good time painting pine cones (which we had found on a hike together) and threading dry slices of oranges (which we had picked from an abandoned tree in our neighbourhood). Experiences over things!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

All I want for Christmas is soup

I’ve been thinking about what I want for this festive season, regardless of what other people or traditions³ expect. Some of my fondest adult memories of Christmas are:

• the time when we danced around a tree with my Danish friends in Pichilemu

• the time when my beloved spent Christmas with my family for the first time, and they laughed because he slept on the freezing balcony to experience the premium insulating properties of his new sleeping bag

• the time when my mum cooked a delicious creamy chestnut soup with gingerbread croûtons

• the time when we attended Midnight Mass at Westminster Abbey⁴ in London, and sneaked out because I was just days from giving birth and couldn’t sit still for 90 minutes

Things I notice:

• they were brief, simple, shared moments

• they happened only once (so far) and involved novelty/discovery

• someone else helped to make those moments happen

In short: what I like is to spend time with people I love, let myself be surprised and cared for, and not try too hard to engineer magic or meaning. (What does your idea of seasonal joy look like? Is Christmas meaningful to you/your culture at all?)

I also recognise that someone has to cook the chestnut soup and find a tree so we can dance around it. So I’ll keep picking pine cones and oranges, because I like doing it, and maybe that will contribute to someone else’s happy memories further down the line.

Yes, giving (and receiving) gifts brings joy to a lot of us!

According to this article published by Science in 2008, “spending money on others promotes happiness more than spending money on oneself”. One arm of the study involved giving $5 or $20 to participants in the morning; those who had been randomly assigned to spend the money by 5pm on a gift for another person or a charity donation reported greater happiness than those instructed to spend it on a bill or a gift for themselves⁵.

“intentional activities— practices in which people actively and effortfully choose to engage—may represent a more promising route to lasting happiness. Supporting this premise, our work demonstrates that how people choose to spend their money is at least as important as how much money they make.”

And because I like practical suggestions:

• here is a lovely, long list of ideas for gifts (not toys) for children, compiled by writer and activist Lucy AitkenRead. Several of these cost zero euros! I tried a few of these ideas myself (including sewing #3!) and think I’ll get #57 for the babies.

• another suggestion I liked from Emma Worrollo, creator of The Playful Den: sitting down with kids to send “play profiles” to Santa (instead of lists of wanted toys). Here are the prompts she shared:

🎄HOW I LIKE TO PLAY
🎄WHAT I’M PROUD OF MYSELF FOR
🎄THINGS THAT BRING ME JOY
🎄WHAT FUN LOOKS LIKE FOR ME
🎄MY PLAY GOALS FOR NEXT YEAR
🎄IF I COULD DO ANYTHING ON XMAS DAY…

playful_den

A post shared by LIVE PLAYFULLY (@playful_den)

Merry prepping! 🌟

1. I wrote about Kasser’s work (with Mònica Guillen-Royo) on happiness and materialism last week:

#6: Can everyone afford intrinsic motivation? (Part 1)

2. Instead, gifts are symbolically pooped out by a friendly-faced log that children are instructed to beat with a stick on Christmas day, and also brought on 6 January by Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar (who arrive into town with a street parade of Tour de France proportions, complete with motorcycles and candy showers)

3. Being part of a multicultural family, I realise how made-up and alienating foreign traditions can feel. At the same time, I feel protective of traditions that feel mine, and that I would take for granted if I lived closer to home.

4. Hot tip: attending Christmas Mass is free while visiting the Abbey costs 24 pounds per person. This year’s service is already fully booked, though.

5. Those findings were confirmed across cultures and countries, rich and poor, in a later study.