I gave my boss cookies. I felt good about it.

I gave my assistant cookies, juice boxes of wine (impulse buy), and a gift card. Felt good about that, too.

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I get something very small for my boss (usually a $20 bottle of wine or an ornament. This year it's an ornament from Gumps.) but go all out on my employees.

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I'm glad I've never been in a position where giving a boss a gift seemed required. It's odd. I mean, make the choice if you want to, but don't apply pressure.

We have the Christmas lunch tomorrow and I don't want to go and everyone's supposed to give $$ or bring food. There's no way I'm making stuff and I missed the $$ deadline. I just haven't worked out how grinchy I'm willing to appear.

Hell, I'll work through it. I just don't want a holiday party.

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Ah well. I guess no gifts for me then.

Hush, you. You get plenty of gifts. Besides, no one can ever buy anything for you before you run out and buy it for yourself!

I also think that there's a big difference between giving gifts to a boss in a small business like yours where you are collegial with your employees and in a corporate or school environment. I sure as heck don't have money to buy my bosses gifts, but I will write a little card for them.

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I don't feel obligated to get my boss anything. I genuinely like her, though, so it's easy to feel generous. But I have the best staff in the history of best staffs (present company excluded) and love to be as generous as I can afford. I did settle on AmEx gift cards, though. Usually I am not a big fan, but they have such different lifestyle circumstances that it's the only way I could fairly give to them.

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I don't get my boss anything. I don't want to start the gift cycle. I still exchange with my old boss, though. But that's more about our personal relationship.

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I'm glad I've never been in a position where giving a boss a gift seemed required. It's odd. I mean, make the choice if you want to, but don't apply pressure.

100% this.

However, my counterpart and I were snarking over our boss buying cookies for the whole department because she feels like has "too many direct reports" to give individual gifts. Technically? She has three: me, counterpart, and her assistant. Granted, there's a third position on our level that's been vacant, so she had to do reviews for the folks in that area, so I guess she feels like they are her reports, too, but whatev.

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I am totally okay with not getting day-job related gifts. We each get a meal voucher, and let's not even get started about caf quality--I'd have to walk ten fifteen minutes (uh, uphill in SoCal winter) to even get to it.

Not gonna happen. I'm good with getting nothing, not even a bonus.

Though I like bonuses, and everyone should totally give me one right now.

Krav gives gifts to all the instructors every year. They're very deliberate branding/culty gifts--they give us something with the krav logo on it that will never be for sale. Cracks me up on the Sunday after the holiday party to see how many instructors show up wearing the dosh from the night before (most years it's some sort of jackety thing).

And I'm totally one of the sheep. I don't know why I do it for krav when I wouldn't do it for so many other things. You wouldn't have caught me dead displaying a McGill logo until I left Montreal.

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So, I sent an email to UPS complaining because I was pressured into spending $40 to guarantee Christmas delivery (because the UPS Store people lied and said December 24th was a holiday but when I checked the UPS calendar it isn't).

They have now responded with "it is a holiday, here's a link to our holiday page"--where it states that December 24th is not observed as holiday! And the calendar page clearly states that Ground packages are delivered on that day. Furthermore, the other package I sent Ground is scheduled to be delivered on December 24th. Grrrr! Arrgh!

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I gave my last boss gifts, because she was an excellent boss and because we became good friends even while working in that relationship. Drew, I hope the ranting isn't pinging you, because you obviously don't have the straight hierarchical corporate relationship with your people, and more power to you.

But this is different. This is some bizarre "boss gave traditional boss gift so we all have to turn around and wow her with something cool and amazing and yadda yadda..." Like payback for the gift, which, whatever. Plus some bitterness over the "ooh, [Boss] bought a condo, we have to get her something" shit, and the general "take up collections at every opportunity for some people and not for others."

(Also, hee! Reply all email from the "Steph" referenced above: "FYI - I am against the housewarming gift idea and am upset that my name got dragged into this.")

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