Students celebrate winter holidays with gift exchanges

Now is the time of year when De Neve Dining Hall starts serving leftover turkey, water falls from the sky and winter break looms ominously over the student body.

As in every year, students mark the return to classic holiday themes – red and white clothing, holiday sweaters on Bruinwalk – signifying that the season is well underway. While students studying for finals might be too bogged down to appreciate the festive themes, they certainly appreciate a good gift.

UCLA Store employee and fifth-year jazz studies student Matt Gafney said he thinks the most popular clothing gag gifts this year are tacky sweaters and, to a much lesser extent, Hawaiian shirts.

Jasmine Guevara, a first-year undeclared student said she thinks gift cards can be thoughtful gifts, even though others may see them as a gesture showing a lack of care.

Guevara said a gift card may be preferable to an unwanted or unused gift, as thoughtful a gesture as it might be. It’s more acceptable to find out what someone wants beforehand, too.

Generally, once the dorms close, students return home to spend time with their families and engage their varied cultural heritage in winter holiday festivities, from Christmas to Hanukkah to Kwaanza to Festivus.

Fourth-year sociology student Angélica Esquivel celebrates Christmas, but also Three Kings Day on Jan. 6, which commemorates the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus. Three Kings Day is widely celebrated in Catholic homes in Latin America and elsewhere around the world.

“We do the Rosca, which is like a huge donut. Inside, at the bottom, people put little plastic babies,” Esquivel said.

Esquivel said if your slice of the Rosca de Reyes contains one of the plastic babies on Jan. 6, you’re required to gift a large meal to the Candlemas celebrations on Feb. 2.

Gift exchanges are popular in many dorms. Variants include the classic Secret Santa, where the gifter’s identity is hidden from the giftee, and White Elephant, where novelty and gag gifts are stolen between participants. These often have a price limit attached – between $10 and $20 is typical.

“It’s really nice because we all just met each other 10 weeks ago, but everyone’s really invested in it,” Guevara said, of her dorm’s Secret Santa event.

In a gift exchange, students said they make sure that their friends get what they need.

“For the person that’s always studying, they’re getting a mug for coffee and a watch so that they know they can go to bed now. People are just really going all out with the gifts,” Guevara said.

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Holiday Gift Ideas:

Gift cards make a great gift for those indecipherable human enigmas with no perceivable preferences lurking in our lives, but finding a more personal gift can be a Santa-like gesture that goes the extra mile.

Give Books: Gift a book over winter break. It might be the only time the giftee has to read it. If you’re stuck for ideas, try “Texts from Jane Eyre,” a new book that imagines the hypothetical instant messaging conversations of classic literary figures, while keeping their classic characterizations intact.

Write Letters: Tell the people that are important to you what they mean to you. No, really – plausibly deniable post-ironic sincerity is back.

Classic Holiday Films: “Die Hard“ is the perfect movie for Dec. 25 because it captures the universal human desires: spending time with family and defeating Alan Rickman in a game of wits. It’s great to watch with family or friends. Give a gift that steals away time: Netflix Instant.

For White Elephants, Give Snacks: Good coffee, strong tea, candy and cookies are go-to gifts for students struggling with finals. There’s no time to sleep anymore.

Share a Wish List: Give the gift of letting people know exactly what you want by setting up an online wish list. You can set up a public wish list on Amazon.com by going to “Wish List” in the top-menu, then selecting “Create a Wish List”, and setting it to public.