Holiday Gifting Trends: Christmas Gifts Start in September

Christmas is roughly three months out. Shoppers have started anyway.

This week, Christmas gifts made up close to 2% of all gifting, and they came from dozens of different shops rather than one unusually organised store. That makes it a pattern, not a fluke. Of everything shoppers named an occasion for this week, Christmas was the biggest piece by a wide margin, ahead of every other date on the calendar.

Ninety days before Christmas, the December gifts are already in the post.

Thank-you gifting ran ahead of its pace

The other occasion having a good week has no date attached to it at all. Thank-you gifts held 7% of the week's gifting and ran ahead of their recent pace, sent mostly between friends and colleagues.

The gifts themselves are small and quick: a chocolate box, a keepsake, a card with a few lines written inside. Professional gifting is a modest slice of the week overall, but it is the slice where thank-you gifts concentrate, and it does not need a holiday to justify itself.

That matters heading into autumn. Shoppers who are already in the habit of sending something for no calendar reason are the same shoppers who send early for the ones that do have dates.

Britain picked cake, Canada picked comfort

Geography split the week neatly. In Britain, birthdays took 70% of all gifting, an almost single-minded week of candles, cakes and cards. Birthday gifting led in the United States and Australia too, but never that emphatically.

Canadian shoppers went somewhere else entirely. Gifts of comfort, thank-you gifts and the week's earliest seasonal gifts arrived in near equal measure there, giving Canada the most mixed spread of reasons anywhere in the top markets.

Elsewhere, gifting kept crossing borders. Well over half of all gifts this week went to a different country than the shop they came from, and notes arrived in Spanish, Dutch, French, Turkish and Arabic among others. Mid-Autumn Festival lands tomorrow across China, South Korea and East Asia, another reminder that the gifting calendar is not one calendar.

What this means for merchants

Early Christmas shoppers are the best customers of the season. They are unhurried, they choose carefully, and they are the ones most likely to pay for wrapping and a personalized message. A store that waits until November to switch on gift options misses them entirely.

The practical move is to keep gifting available year round rather than seasonally. Birthdays run at 41% of gifting every single week, thank-you gifts arrive with no calendar behind them, and the December wave has already begun. One always-on gift option catches all three.