Gifts of Christmas Past: Buy Secondhand to Give Your Loved Ones the Gift of Nostalgia and Imagination

Gifts of Christmas Past: Buy Secondhand to Give Your Loved Ones the Gift of Nostalgia and Imagination
Vintage items, thoughtfully purchased, make great Christmas gifts. Marina Shanti/Shutterstock
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Christmas is a period for celebrating our relationships with family and friends—a time filled with nostalgia and sentimentality. Of course, for many people, it’s also a time of conspicuous consumption, even if this year in the face of a cost-of-living crisis, spending is expected to fall. But in times of uncertainty and anxiety for the future, feelings of nostalgia often come to the fore as people look back fondly on happier times.

Perhaps then, this Christmas is the time to move away from the tradition of splurging on new, box-fresh presents and give your loved ones the gift of the past.

Omar Khaled Abdelrahman is a lecturer in marketing at the University of Huddersfield in the UK.
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