To air my biases, I think the whole thing exists to exploit a western cultural foible that thinks just giving people money is somehow shameful or unimaginative. Worse than the endless parade of candles, soaps, cheap booze, chocolate, wallets and so forth that people get each other (we've all got that relative or co-worker that still thinks Ferrero Rochers are exotic). So we hit somewhere in the middle and buy Monopoly money you can only spend at one place, with probably not enough value to get something they'll actually want. Or it circuitously drops a hint like, 'buy something from this sporting goods franchise, tubby'.
It's a great way to assuage some guilt around effort and indecision, despite these things
famously going
unspent a lot of the time. They might have actually burned that candle at least. We all might as well ceremonially burn a few notes at the Christmas dinner table. That would actually be kind of cool.
(It just occurred to me that you can probably get gift cards for the local smelly candle chain too. That's got to be the worst present I can think of. Just slap who ever it's for straight in the face to show how much you care instead).
Anyway, my take is that we should learn a thing or two from other cultures like the Chinese and decide that cash is a perfectly great gift that you can spend on stuff n that. /twocentsroundeduptofive.
But I realise I might be missing out on some subtleties of the experience. Please folks, do share your thoughts on the subject.