From Newsweek, December 20:
Historians have uncovered evidence of a remarkable recycling network in 16th-century England during the period of the Tudor monarchs.
The House of Tudor was a dynasty that held the English throne from 1485 to 1603, producing five monarchs, including iconic figures such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
The recycling network involved rich fabrics and delicate embroidery seized from religious institutions closed by Henry VIII during the English Reformation.
The Reformation was a process by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Catholic Church over the course of the 16th century. This process, initiated by Henry VIII (who ruled the country from 1509 to 1547), eventually established the Protestant Church of England, with the English monarch becoming its supreme head.
Preliminary findings of a research project conducted by the U.K. National Trust and the University of Exeter have shown how textiles seized during the Reformation were saved and repurposed through a recycling network.
These seized textiles included church vestments—fine religious garments worn by clergy members—made in the earlier medieval period. The researchers found that the vestments made their way into Tudor society's homes and living spaces via a network that included government officials, merchants, craftspeople and extended families....
....MUCH MORE
And steps toward an answer to the headline question:
Re-gifting: It's a Memory Thing
It is astonishing to see what lengths some people will go to in giving presents at Christmas. I am told they will borrow, go in debt, or even steal to gratify their desires. The ladies get the worst of it, of course. It requires great skill to manage the whole business successfully and economically. I was told by a lady friend not long ago that in her exchanges last Christmas one of her friends returned, through a mistake, the gift she had sent to her the year before....
Via the sadly departed Division of Labor blog
And:
“The Gifts We Keep on Giving: Documenting and Destigmatizing the Regifting Taboo”
As the clock ticks down for procrastinators this paper becomes more and more important.
From Harvard Business School via Harvard's DASH:
AbstractFive studies investigate whether the practice of "regifting"-a social taboo-is as offensive to givers as regifters assume. Participants who imagined regifting thought that the original givers would be more offended than givers reported feeling, to such an extent that receivers viewed regifting as similar in offensiveness to throwing gifts away (whereas givers clearly preferred the former). This asymmetry in emotional reactions to regifting was driven by an asymmetry in beliefs about entitlement. Givers believed that the act of gift giving passed "title" to the gift on to receivers-such that receivers were free to decide what to do with the gift; in contrast, receivers believed that givers retained some "say" in how their gifts were used. Finally, an intervention designed to destigmatize regifting by introducing a different normative standard (i.e., National Regifting Day) corrected the asymmetry in beliefs about entitlement and increased regifting.
