Our company is organizing one of those grab-a-gift-from-the-table gift exchanges.  My client’s office is arranging one, too.  I’m not allowed, for ethics reasons, to give anyone a gift at my client’s office.  But somehow swapping $20-limit goodies works, since I don’t know who specifically will get it?  (Yep, I looked it up in my client’s online ethics manual: if I don’t know who I’m giving it to, it’s completely ethical.)

Seems like then I’m not giving to make someone’s day brighter, since I have no real idea who I’m gifting to or what they’d like.  Forgive my Scrooge-i-ness, but it seems like then I’m giving so I can get something from the table.  Something which someone else has no idea whether I’d like.

I can’t help but thinking we’d be a little more in the Christmas spirit if we all just put cards on the table that said “I put a coat on someone for you today”, or “I gave someone dinner in your (non-specific, ethically pardonable) name today”.