Imagine the following scenario:

Your friends and/or family gather for the holidays. After a shared meal and perhaps some conversation, a large table is cleared and everyone sits around it. Each person lays a twenty-dollar bill on the table. At the host’s signal, each person moves their bill toward the person on their left. Everyone then takes the bill passed to them from their right.

Congratulations! Your friends and/or family have just celebrated an efficient, low-impact, bloodless Christmas, bereft of personal touch or recognition.

I realize gifts aren’t the reason for the season. I know I’m at an age when I should be less excited about what I might be getting for Christmas and more excited about the spiritual and emotional aspects. I’m lamentably aware that the person who buys me the best gifts is myself, because I know me best and I don’t limit my self-gift-giving to just Christmastime.

And yet…when I buy gifts for other people, I try to brainstorm ideas for the loved one in question with a modicum of creativity. I don’t always succeed, but I do try. The act of gift-giving itself can, for better or worse, reveal how well you know a person, how much of an effort you think they’re worth, and how imaginatively you can apply your problem-solving skills to such a task.

Obvious moral disclaimer: judging the gifts you’ve been given is frequently not cool. However, in my weaker moments, it’s not hard for the darker part of my subconscious to observe something I’ve just unwrapped and begin running background calculations to ascertain how much or how little thought or care went into the exchange.

That sinful part of me ranks gifts as follows, in order from noblest to most heinous:

1. Charitable giving and doing. 1 Corinthians 10:24 is the short-form moral applied here: “No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.” Donations to worthy causes, working at a soup kitchen, adopt-a-family gift programs, Christmas caroling at group homes, improving quality-of-life for the infirm — whatever form it takes when you’re elevating others instead of yourself with your time and efforts over the holidays, you’re probably getting it right.

2. Mere Christmas presence, contact, or general demonstrations of intangible love. For many people, this is a major Christmas wish in and of itself. Reunions of all types, either in person or via communication devices (phone, Skype, whatever), can be a big deal. If no one can afford presents, sometimes this is all a family can give to each other, but it can mean more than the world. (This category does not include showing up at the same old monthly family gathering, hiding in a corner, and refusing to interact…or worse, showing up but spending the entire time playing with your phone instead of mingling with live beings. Not the same thing at all.)

3. Gifts handmade by the giver, even if they’re hideous. Look: they probably worked really hard on it. They may have had a limited budget. Perhaps their inner talents could use some direct mentoring, and their results don’t quite match the pictures on the boxes of the craft kits they used. Also, they may be age four or ninety-four. Protocol and manners dictate that you accept the gift and the good intention behind it; you say thank you; and you remind yourself that some people in the world would kill to have sort kind of sincere sentiment extended in their direction.

4. Ordinary store-bought objects, tailored to your specific needs or tastes. In other words, things given to you by people who know you best — what clothing styles you like, TV shows you watch, small appliances you don’t have, hobbies you enjoy, Hallmark gewgaws you collect, and so on. Once upon a time, this was the baseline for the average Christmas shopper. I like to think so, anyway.

5. Ordinary store-bought objects, suitable for any human. If a sack full of these gifts had all their To/From labels switched, no one would notice. This category includes Hickory Farms sausage-and-cheese sets, Christmas candies, and 90% of all stocking stuffers. They lack individuality, but can be practical crowd-pleasers that people wouldn’t ordinarily buy for themselves.

6. Hideous mass-produced store-bought objects. It’s one thing for dear old legally blind Great-Aunt Beulah to hand out personally neon-orange-and-purple sweaters with Christmas wreaths stitched on them. It’s quite another to hand out garish wreath-sweaters manufactured in foreign sweatshops and sold for three bucks apiece at Dollar Hovel. Such effrontery can suffice as gifts in “white elephant” exchanges; if given sincerely, unpleasant incidents can and should occur.

7. Gift cards. The gift that says, “Here, now you can go shop.” The giver thinks you deserve a gift, but has no idea what you want and thinks it would be better for all involved if you would simply do the hard part for them. I think it’s a creative change of pace when those cards come from unusual places (e.g., obscure boutiques, comic book shops, other small businesses). Cards from the usual monolithic big-box stores…meh. They’re more versatile than socks and underwear, but with the same level of pizzazz.

8. Cash. The gift that says, “Here, now you can whatever. My work here is done. Begone.” Except in dire circumstances when the recipient is undergoing tragic financial struggles, the giver has basically tipped you like a bellhop or shoeshine boy. How heart-warming.

9. New vehicles, property, and other enormous constructs. I suppose how one-percenters celebrate their holidays is their business, but I’ve never understood parents who give their children brand new cars as gifts for any occasion, instead of instilling them with the work ethic and budgetary skills to earn and purchase their own. I could understand picking up a used $500 starter jalopy for a diligent graduate, sure, but handing a spoiled child a 2013 Acura with no strings attached reinforces the notion that their parents will always be a safety net of unlimited resources, so becoming a competent adult in their own right is technically optional.

10. Fruitcakes. UGH. NO. WHY. Does any company still manufacture these anti-food supplements, or are people still regifting the last specimens that rolled off the assembly lines thirty years ago, right before they broke and incinerated the molds?

I have to work very hard to prevent myself from applying this order of operations to everything I unwrap, but there’s that precocious little boy inside me who remembers that chapter in Gary Chapman’s classic book The Five Love Languages about how gift-giving can be an expression of love. That inner boy latched onto that notion tightly and keeps wanting to carry it to a selfish, insecure extreme. He needs to knock it off, or else next year I’ll ask everyone he knows to give him nothing but fruitcakes.