Gift Giving Will Be Different This Year

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/fashion/holiday-gift-giving.html

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The coronavirus already has changed the way we work, shop, spend leisure time and see friends and extended family. Now it is altering the way we think about gifts — and giving them — this holiday season.

“The fact that I’m getting presents is different because it’s just not our way,” said Petrice Jones, a 27-year-old English actor. But because he won’t be at home, he shopped: a skateboard, an audiobook, online cookery classes and more.

He can’t deliver gifts to family members because filming the second season of Netflix’s “Locke & Key” is going to keep him in Toronto. “We only have a few weeks off so I would have to quarantine for two weeks in England and two weeks in Canada, so it wouldn’t work,” said Mr. Jones, who also is chief executive of The One Movement, a project to turn plastic bottles into homes.

Here are some ways other people from around the globe will be observing the holidays this year.

Founder and executive director of Lagos Fashion Week and Style House Files, a fashion business development organization based in Lagos, Nigeria

Gift giving this year will be therapeutic, Ms. Akerele, 42, said in a Zoom call from her home office in Lagos.

Nigeria’s largest city has been convulsed in recent weeks by protests against police brutality, especially the controversial Special Anti-Robbery Squad, known as SARS. The resulting curfew, and concerns about the coronavirus, forced her to push Lagos Fashion Week from its original October dates to February or March. (Instead, her team has arranged for local designers to sell to consumers and retailers through the fashion platforms Moda Operandi, Tranoï and Le New Black in November and December.)

“It’s completely draining trying to survive two viruses: We’re trying to survive #EndSARS and Covid-19,” she said. “It’s mental.”

Family gifts will be the usual books, clothes and fabrics, but the garments will be more practical — like a scarf or an embroidered boubou (or caftan) — as, Ms. Akerele said, her relatives “haven’t really gone out much this year.” She also expects to spend 25 to 50 percent less than she has in the past on gifts for the 35 guests she plans to have on Christmas Day because, “as a business, we haven’t had such a great year, you know, in terms of revenue,” she said.

Ms. Akerele intends to buy most of her gifts locally to show her support, as many businesses have been vandalized in the protests, she said. And, she added, she is planning “something relaxing and therapeutic, like a spa treatment” with her four sisters and mother.

Fashion curator, Montreal

Spending more time at home because of the pandemic has made Mr. Loriot, a 44-year-old model turned curator, consider Christmas gifts more carefully this year.

“It’s more about home-focused goods and things that are more human related, that are more comfortable, like a bathrobe that I would not have bought before,” he said on the phone from his Montreal apartment. He worked from there in recent months, using video, to install the “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime” exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Munich (closed until the end of November to comply with coronavirus restrictions; the exhibition is to run through Feb. 28).

He said he would buy gifts of sauces and flavored salts from some newly discovered markets and online shops. And he will also cook gifts — particularly for his parents in Quebec City so that they all can share “some kind of dinner by video, and, you know, that we can all eat the same thing” at the same time, he said.

As Mr. Loriot plans to remain in Montreal into next year, skis for cross country and alpine touring are on his own wish list. “So if I want to go skiing on a Wednesday afternoon for the first time in my life, it will be possible,” he said.

Co-founder of Ambush jewelry (which has extended into clothes and accessories) and design director of jewelry at Dior Men; based in Tokyo

Ms. Ahn is buying practical gifts this year, she said on the phone from her office in Tokyo’s fashionable Shibuya district.

Case in point: scented candles for her husband, Verbal, a hip-hop artist, for his office and at home. Or bath products for friends and employees “to enjoy more in their own personal space,” she said. While Tokyo, at least in mid-November, had not reinstituted its coronavirus restrictions, “people aren’t going out like crazy or anything,” she said. “There’s still kind of like a little bit of guard up.”

Ms. Ahn is buying most of her gifts online this year — just in case, she said, shops in Tokyo don’t have the items she wants in stock. “There’ll be more options available online because of what’s happening, so it’s quite exciting actually,” she said.

As a present for herself, Ms. Ahn is looking for a 1980s yellow gold Patek Philippe Nautilus 3800 to add to her vintage watch collection, as “I’ve been learning about the watch movement and all that stuff,” she said.

A multimedia artist whose work includes photography, video and sculpture as well as a self-published book of poems, “The Becoming Light of Water”; based in Naples, Italy

Ms. Orme, 32, said she intended to buy wines, books, sweets and more from local, independent businesses because they “are having a really hard time at the moment so I feel that I’m doing something to help.”

“Disposable income is a massive consideration this year, because there isn’t any,” she said — her multiscreen video installation at the Industry City complex in Brooklyn was canceled because of the pandemic. But Ms. Orme is considering widening her gift list to include people she works with and her mentors “because I feel it’s important to maintain those connections,” she said.

And regardless of what else happens, certain gifts are mandatory: the French lace panties and other lingerie that she buys for her girlfriends. “It’s sort of a running thing that I buy sexy underwear for my female friends,” she said. “So I think that would be sad if it ended because of Covid.”

After all, she said, “everybody loves a bit of fun.”

Co-owner of HighKey Holdings Inc., whose companies include social media management, tech products sales, and real estate investment; based in Winnipeg, Canada

The pandemic has inspired the Christmas gifts that Mr. Lintz, a 21-year-old social media entrepreneur, plans to buy his parents: an iPhone for his father and one for his mother (rather than the jewelry he usually buys for her).

The goal is to keep them “more connected with us online because we all have iPhones, so on iMessage group chats,” Mr. Lintz said on the phone from the home where he lives and works with his two brothers.

On his own wish list is a black Tesla Model X sport-utility vehicle — with wheel upgrades — that he intends to buy and share with his older brother. “If Covid wasn’t going on we’d be traveling and a car wouldn’t be in the equation,” he said.

He will buy all the gifts, including the Tesla (which starts around $80,000), online as, he said, “there’s just no advantage going into a store anymore.”

Associate professor, Parsons School of Design, New York

There will be no parties this season — so Champagne and wine are off the shopping list — but Mr. Hughes, 54, said he would buy bacon, bangers and other foods for the Christmas Day brunch at his cousins’ home in New Jersey.

But the shopping probably will have to be done early, and the perishables frozen, as the pandemic restrictions at local grocery stores mean “I will probably have to wait outside in a line,” Mr. Hughes said on a Zoom call from his Greenwich Village home office.

There is one change Mr. Hughes is thinking about: To reconnect with other family and friends, he said, he might send Christmas cards this year, “which is something that I have not done for well over a decade.”

On his own wish list are candles, like Jonathan Adler’s Hashish candle with its woody and tobacco scents. “If you are at home during winter time and not really going anywhere,” he said, the scents give you a feeling of safety.

Musician, model and former first lady of France

For Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy, 52, buying presents for this Christmas is harder than usual. “It looks like there’s no future,” she said in a phone interview from her home studio in Paris, where she also recorded her sixth album (“Carla Bruni”), which was released in October.

“It’s not easy to get gifts for my husband,” she said of Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France, now facing corruption charges in court. “I’m searching in a few directions because my husband only likes art. And everything is closed.”

But she has found a special gift for their 9-year-old daughter, Giulia: a 3-month-old kitten, as Giulia has been asking for one and “a cat likes to be inside so it’s good for being confined,” she said.

She prefers browsing in shops for “something you didn’t think of buying as a present,” but Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy said she would be buying most of her gifts online as, she said, there is little choice, considering the restrictions that France has imposed in recent weeks to try to stem the recent surge of Covid-19 cases. And, she said, some of the gifts “will have to be poetic presents, like a song.”

This year, she said, she also is giving more money than usual to charities — like Restaurants du Coeur, a French charity that distributes food packages and hot meals to those in need. “It’s not something you can buy, but that’s something that is the best thing you can do at Christmas time,” she said.

Fashion designer, London

For Ms. Rocha, 34, her usual practice of delivering homemade cakes and other gifts has become less likely this year. As a result of the lockdowns, “a few of our family and friends have moved out of the cities, so we have found we are using a lot more post,” she said on the phone from her East London studio.

However, she said, Zoom and other video conferencing services have created new gifting options as “everyone is from the shoulders up, so I think that I’ll definitely be gifting a lot of hair slides, earrings and things like that.”

Her special gift is for her brother, who is a chef: “This time I’m going to get him a beautiful notebook and pen and paper so he can writes his recipes down, because that’s something that was really important to him in lockdown.”

And at the top of her wish list? “To be able to go back to Ireland for Christmas,” to see family and friends and, after weeks of lockdown, be in the fresh air by the sea.