Holiday gifting without the corporate cringe

In late November, a strange thing happens in offices around the world. Procurement teams open a spreadsheet titled "Holiday Gifts 2026" and begin the annual ritual of choosing a gift basket for several thousand people they will never meet. The basket will contain shortbread. It will contain a small jar of jam. It will contain something gold-colored. It will be, by any reasonable measure, fine. And it will be forgotten by January 4th.

Holiday gifts have a specific challenge: they cross more cultural and religious boundaries than any other gift you will send all year. Not everyone celebrates Christmas. Not everyone is even in a December-celebrating culture. Not everyone wants alcohol, pork, dairy, or extremely sweet things. The default gift basket is, charitably, designed for one specific demographic and silently exclusive of several others.

A more useful framing: the holiday gift is not a Christmas gift. It is an end-of-year acknowledgment. The thing you are saying is "we made it through another year together." That message works across geographies and beliefs without modification.

"The holiday gift is not a Christmas gift. It is an end-of-year acknowledgment. Frame it that way and it stops being awkward."

• A printed year-in-review object — a small zine, a comic, a poster — that documents what the team actually did. Specific. Photographable. Shareable. Works in every country.
• A high-quality small object specific to your industry or company. A tool. A book. A custom-made thing. Crosses borders without translation.
• An experience credit (a meal, a workshop, a small course) that the recipient picks the date and content for. Universally usable.

• Anything explicitly Christmas-themed unless your entire workforce is in Christmas-celebrating cultures (and even then, be careful).
• Edible gifts that include pork, alcohol, or dairy as the central element. Too many recipients are excluded.
• Anything that requires the recipient to be at a specific address. Many people travel during the holidays.
• Generic "festive" branding that reads as having been chosen by a committee of eight people in October.

A small, almost-free addition that makes any holiday gift dramatically better: a real letter, written by a real person, addressed to the recipient by name, that names something specific they did this year. Not "thank you for your contributions." Specifically what they shipped, fixed, presented, or held together. Two sentences is enough.

The letter does the emotional work. The gift carries the letter. Together they make the recipient feel seen at a moment of the year when most corporate communication is, frankly, exhausted. That is a powerful thing. It costs almost nothing. Almost no one does it.

Got a story worth printing?

Whether it's an onboarding kit, an anniversary issue, or a farewell gift you want people to keep for a decade — we'd love to hear about it. Tell us the occasion and we'll come back with a brief in two business days.