Published on 2/4/2016
In 400 AD, to honor one or more of these poor fellows, the Pope declared Feb. 14 St. Valentine’s Day. By 1400 it was common to exchange messages of love on Valentine’s Day, and by the mid-1th century small tokens like flowers and sweet treats were the norm. It wasn’t even Hallmark that first mass-produced Valentine’s Day cards in America—that distinction belongs to Esther Howland, whose ultra-feminine cut paper cards, inscribed with sentimental verse, were produced in the 1840s.
Now that the history lesson is over, let’s take a few minutes to think about the estimated $19 billion that Americans will spend on the holiday this year.
But back to the idea of a couples vacation. The preference for a gift of time spent together, rather than material things, is interesting because it denotes a genuine desire to reinforce bonds of love and intimacy.
Marketing professor Cassir Mogilner and management professor Cindy Chen co-authored a paper about the power of experiential gifts to connect people socially. The researchers conducted experiments that determined that…
“When recipients receive an experience, regardless of whether they share in that experience with the gift-giver, they feel more connected to the gift giver as a result of it, compared to receiving a material gift.”
They clarify that the receiving of the gift evokes basically the same response—but when the experiential gift is being lived, emotions run higher than they do when the material gift is being used, and emotions are what connect us to other people.
Well, here’s a tip from us to you: wrap your gift, whatever it may be, in an experience that the two of you can enjoy together—like a scavenger hunt with a sparkly ending.