Call me Scrooge, but I have a problem with holiday gift giving. Don’t get me wrong; I love the holiday season for other reasons. I love the funky ornaments that cling to my family’s Christmas tree every year as if a giant had used the tree to sweep up the floor of Santa’s toy room. I love how there’s a sudden influx of candy and food entering my house, particularly the appearance of the German nut bread called “stolen,” a name that inevitably leads to the same joke every year: “Well, who’d you steal it from?” Alas, I even love seeing my family, lame jokes and all.

The problem is that I don’t think its “gifts” we exchange during the holidays. They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I say there’s no such thing as a free gift, or at least during the holidays. As the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, a gift is “something, the possession of which is transferred to another without the expectation or receipt of an equivalent.” A gift is, by its very nature, free. But how many of the “gifts” you received this holiday season were actually free?

Every year, my friends and I exchange gifts. I got my friend Katie the new Belle & Sebastian album for Christmas this year and she got me the new David Sedaris book. I felt good about this exchange because we both spent roughly equal amounts of money and thought when buying our gifts. Unfortunately, the exchange between my friend Ramey and I did not go as smoothly. I gave her a sweater (a cute sweater) and she forgot to get me a present.

It should be obvious by now that I’m not that into gifts, but even I felt a sudden and intense pang of disappointment as I realized Ramey had forgotten to get me a present. This was a feeling I had felt at least two times before. The first was the Christmas of 2002 when I racked my brain thinking of the perfect gift for my best friend, settling on an obscure independent film that she mentioned having loved years earlier. In exchange, she got me the DVD of a movie I hated — a movie I’m pretty sure I told her I hated. The second time I had this feeling of disappointment at receiving a gift was last Christmas when I spent hours making my boyfriend a cute trinket box. I actually made the damn thing, filling each of its drawers with a different little present, only to learn on Christmas day that all he got me was a book — a lame book.

The dictionary might define a gift as something transferred without the expectation of an equivalent, but I for one expect an equivalent! And I’m certainly not the only one. In that book Katie got me for Christmas, David Sedaris describes how he actually keeps a ledger of everything anyone ever got him for Christmas and how much he estimates those gifts cost. He refers back to this ledger when buying gifts for people, looking to see how much a person spent on him so that he may spend an equivalent amount on them. Sedaris not only expects an equivalent gift, he makes sure he gets one.

So either the definition of a gift is wrong or what Sedaris and I are giving away at Christmas are not gifts.

I don’t think they’re gifts. I believe in the concept of a gift, something that you give without expecting something in return. I believe in it because it is a beautiful concept to me, this idea that humans have the capacity and the desire to give selflessly. And it’s not that I have a problem with the presents we exchange during the holidays. I actually appreciate the opportunity it gives me to think about my friends and what they’re interested in. It’s just that these presents we give are not gifts. A gift is something special, something that isn’t given every time something is given. A gift is a unique kind of present, the kind you only give and get a handful of times in your life. It’s the kind of thing you give anonymously, the kind of thing you give solely for the benefit of its recipient and for the joy of giving. The distinction is important because without it, we loose a word for a very beautiful, very human phenomenon.

This week’s column was written by Vinni. He and Bharat write this column, sometimes together, sometimes separately. You can contact them at vpi@stanford.edu and/or bvenkat@stanford.edu.