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Christmas

The gift that outlasts Boxing Day

An economist once argued that Christmas presents waste money. What he left out, what helps in a five-week summer holiday, and a book for the long road.

By the Story for Me team · · 4 min read

A boy in striped pyjamas flies laughing from an open bedroom window over the lights of Cape Town on a moonlit night, trailing golden sparkles, with Table Mountain and Lion’s Head behind him.

Officially, South Africa has no Boxing Day. The 26 December holiday is the Day of Goodwill, and in 2026 it falls on a Saturday; since the Public Holidays Act moves only a Sunday holiday to the Monday, there is no extra Monday off.1 So the day after Christmas is simply a summer Saturday, and a good Christmas gift for a South African child is one still in use that Saturday, and all through the long holiday after.

In short

  • The famous study that found Christmas wastes money told its students to leave out sentimental value.
  • A story improves with use: three-year-olds who heard the same one three times in a week learned its new words.
  • Public schools close on 9 December 2026 and reopen on 13 January 2027: five weeks of holiday, and maybe a long drive.
  • On the road, count real things you can both see, then ask, “So how many?”

Does Christmas really waste money?

An economist once said so. In 1993 Joel Waldfogel estimated that holiday gift-giving “destroys between 10 percent and a third of the value of gifts”, but the Yale students he surveyed had been told to value their presents “not counting the sentimental value of the gift”.2 That is much of what a good children’s present is made of. The whole argument, and what psychologists have since found about price, surprise and sentiment, is in the psychology of a good gift.

Let the little ones give, too. In a small Canadian study, toddlers under two were happier giving treats to a puppet than getting treats themselves, and happiest when the treat they gave away was their own.3 A drawing wrapped for Gogo, or a biscuit they choose for a cousin, may turn out to be the present they enjoy most.

Why does a book outlast Boxing Day?

Because a story improves with use. Three-year-olds in a UK lab study who heard the same story three times in a week learned and kept its new words, while those who heard three different stories with the same words “failed to learn any of the new words”.4 The book they ask for again on 27 December may be doing more than you think.

What helps in a five-week summer holiday?

Our Christmas lands in the middle of the long break. Public-school learners finish the year on Wednesday 9 December 2026 and start the 2027 school year on Wednesday 13 January, exactly five weeks later (independent schools set their own dates).5 That is a lot of late nights, beach days and visits to family.

Bedtimes may drift, but the story can stay. In 2020, a panel of 59 experts agreed a definition of a good bedtime routine for children aged 2 to 8: brushing teeth, “reading or sharing a book with children or simply telling a story before bed”, no screens, and all of it in the hour before bed, “fairly consistent across the week and the weekend”.6 A holiday is one long weekend, so keep the book, wherever you are sleeping.

What should we read on the road trip?

Something with a long road in it. In The Golden Road, our retelling of The Wizard of Oz, your child walks the road to the Emerald City with a refrain to shout along to, “Count with me, and come with me!”, and something to count on almost every spread: three spins of the farmhouse, five golden bricks, nine logs for a raft, eleven green towers.

A girl in a yellow raincoat, jeans and red sneakers walks along a winding road of golden bricks between fields of red poppies, looking back over her shoulder, with a green city of towers on the hills ahead.
Lerato on the road in The Golden Road.

The car is a good place to carry on. Nobody has studied our book yet, as it is new, but there is research on this kind of counting. Counting real things you can both see, especially sets of four to ten, is the kind of number talk that small US studies link most with children’s later grasp of numbers,7 and it’s easy to do with a window and an hour of the Karoo. More counting games are in how children learn to count.

When should I order for Christmas?

Christmas order dates will follow once our printer is confirmed, so we won’t guess at them; we’ll add them to this page as soon as we have them. What we can say now: we’re aiming for 7 to 10 days after you approve the preview, and the ebook and trailer reach your phone first. There’s nothing to pay until you’ve seen the cover, and we confirm dates and delivery costs before you pay.

Short of time? The digital edition (R249) is the ebook and the animated trailer, with no printer or courier involved. For the reading itself, though, America’s paediatricians lean towards paper: the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2024 advice favours print books for young children “because digital books do not foster equivalent parent-child interactions”.8 So if you can, keep the printed book for bedtime and the trailer for the reveal; the formats are side by side in our prices.

Giving to a grandchild or godchild? The child’s parent uploads the photos and says yes, and we can send the book to the family with no prices in the parcel: see gifts from grandparents and godparents. For other ages and occasions there is our gift guide, and for a gift that lands after the holiday, a book for starting school.

Sources

  1. South African Government. Public holidays (Public Holidays Act 36 of 1994). gov.za
  2. Waldfogel, J. (1993). The deadweight loss of Christmas. American Economic Review, 83(5), 1328–1336. jstor.org/stable/2117564
  3. Aknin, L. B., Hamlin, J. K., & Dunn, E. W. (2012). Giving leads to happiness in young children. PLoS ONE, 7(6), e39211. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039211
  4. Horst, J. S., Parsons, K. L., & Bryan, N. M. (2011). Get the story straight: Contextual repetition promotes word learning from storybooks. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 17. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00017
  5. Department of Basic Education. 2026 Calendar for public schools, Government Gazette No. 52177, and 2027 Calendar for public schools, Government Gazette No. 52178, both 25 February 2025. 2026 (PDF), 2027 (PDF)
  6. Kitsaras, G., Goodwin, M., Allan, J., & Pretty, I. A. (2021). Defining and measuring bedtime routines in families with young children: A DELPHI process for reaching wider consensus. PLOS ONE, 16(2), e0247490. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247490
  7. Levine, S. C., Suriyakham, L. W., Rowe, M. L., Huttenlocher, J., & Gunderson, E. A. (2010). What counts in the development of young children’s number knowledge? Developmental Psychology, 46(5), 1309–1319. doi.org/10.1037/a0019671; Gunderson, E. A., & Levine, S. C. (2011). Some types of parent number talk count more than others: Relations between parents’ input and children’s cardinal-number knowledge. Developmental Science, 14(5), 1021–1032. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01050.x
  8. Klass, P., Miller-Fitzwater, A., High, P. C., & AAP Council on Early Childhood (2024). Literacy promotion: An essential component of primary care pediatric practice: Policy statement. Pediatrics, 154(6), e2024069090. doi.org/10.1542/peds.2024-069090

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