ABSTRACT
The Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (SPUG), a short-lived reform organization, provides insights into early twentieth-century debates over Christmas excess by illuminating the dangers of certain gifts in the workplace and the home. SPUG's organizers came from opposite ends of the New York social scale: female retail clerks and factory hands and socially elite, reform-minded members of the Woman's Department of the National Civic Federation. The women of SPUG sought to eradicate two types of giving: (1) the ‘Christmas tax’ that coerced department store and factory employees to contribute to gifts for their supervisors, and (2) the ‘exchange gifts’ between acquaintances, friends, and relatives born of habit or reciprocity. Both systems, SPUG claimed, endangered the giver. Poorly paid workers could ill-afford onerous workplace ‘gifts’, which robbed them of money needed for living expenses and family presents. If they refused to contribute, they faced the loss of their positions. Moreover, the systems reduced the gift to a pernicious transaction rather than a voluntary offering to an intimate.
