Olatowun Candide-Johnson
Founder and chief executive of Gaia Africa; Lagos, Nigeria
Buying smaller, more useful gifts like books and planners for family members is Ms. Candide-Johnson’s gifting strategy this year as, she said, “the naira is shaky” and she has less disposable income than in the past.
“This time it’s not going to just be, you know, see and buy, it will be budget,” she said. Or at least “I’m going to try,” she added.
She intends to visit the pop-up stores in Lagos, which offer items like baskets and leather jewelry. And she intends to do some shopping during a business trip to Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of the month, looking for unusual things that “I haven’t ever seen before,” she said.
Even where she is spending Christmas has become a financial consideration as her son and two daughters live overseas (in New York, London and Farnham, southwest of London). So “having them come back home will be a lot more expensive than it has ever been because we are talking about fares that have doubled or tripled,” she said. “It may be actually easier if we all meet up somewhere.”
Lei Xu
Opera singer; Shanghai and New York
Ms. Xu, 39, has been living in New York with her aunt’s family since July as China’s zero-Covid policy has restricted performances, cutting into her income and forcing her to dip into savings for gifts this season.
She has earmarked some of her fee from recent dual-role performances in Tan Dun’s “Buddha Passion” in Seattle to get gifts for her family, like an art-themed scarf from the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art for her aunt. And she plans to use Steam, a video game digital distribution service, to buy and share a video game, Red Dead Redemption 2, with her uncle. “If I make my account as a family account,” she said, “then if I have the game, he has the game.”
