On receipt
It's annoying (both logistically and emotionally) that there's an unspoken (usually) obligation to hold onto gifts until the nearest applicable gift-giving holiday or birthday. Of course, everybody dreads being the person to show up empty-handed on the big day if they can't find or afford something sufficient contemporaneously; that's why, if an opportunity shows up, they'll often put it in the bank (or more literally, their closet). But lately I've begun to lose patience for this particular song and dance.
I often think about how the context of actions shape their true meaning, and in this case, I think the inherent obligation of gift-giving days cheapens the act itself. Obviously this dynamic is understood on some level by most people exposed to it - it's often satirized in entertainment in the form of characters who give expensive, gaudy gifts that don't have much to do with their recipient's taste or needs. Additionally (and more insidiously), I would point out that when someone says they would just as soon receive gift cards or cash as anything else, that implies conversely that they (more or less) only value their gifts as much as their weight in gold. So, both givers and receivers can be seen subscribing this black-and-red way of thinking. On paper, translating a love language into MSRP appears extremely rude, but I think it's a sort of logical endpoint of a scenario that amplifies the transactional nature of gift-giving. If you wanted to alternatively analyze this through a pop psych lens, you could argue that people only have so much emotional energy to expend on both giving and receiving gifts, and that these free-for-alls tend to sap that energy pretty quickly. What's also sapped are people's wallets, which can literally cheapen gifts (ergo limit the range of options available to the giver) with the threat or reality of not having enough left over to produce gifts for other people.
Of course, it is nice to receive gifts (and to give them), so it's understandable to want to incentivize that, and it probably is necessary to provide a social incentive for many people (and for many more casual relationships). But wouldn't it be better to be able to rely on the assumption that a gift affirms (on its own merit) a strong bond between you and another person? That it occurred to them, that they had the personal desire, to go out of their way to provide something for you? I don't think it's sensible to make that assumption on the day whereupon you also exchanged gifts with the cousin you last spoke to in April (of last year). ~∓~
(P.S. As always, the irony strikes me, in thinking about "obligations", that I've been looking for a topic to write a blog post about primarily out of a sense of obligation, not to any readers, nor to myself, but primarily to being able to claim the blog is active in a real sense. So it goes.)