Bitcoin has crashed, but cash is still king – ask any child

My wife does most of our Christmas shopping, but there are some unfortunate young people for whom I have sole responsibility. They can expect a top from Gap or similar, which they can exchange if it doesn’t fit or suit them.

When, come early January, they plod along to take advantage of this facility (because the chances of my having picked the right top are minute), they will be thinking: “Why couldn’t Uncle Andrew have given me cash, the silly old sod?” Which is ironic, because that is exactly what I would like to have done. Cash is the ideal present in many circumstances, and the least laborious to obtain or bestow.

But for that very reason it is seen as a decadent Christmas gift, and I assume the prejudice is only increasing. Since 2015, electronic payments have outstripped cash in the UK, and the chip and pin machine is lazily proffered whenever I make a purchase over a fiver. When I flourish a twenty at a barman he flinches, and handles the note with distaste.

On Monday, no doubt, some tech savvy givers will be handing over tiny fragments of Bitcoin as fashionable presents, each of which may by then be worth substantial sums or, to judge by yesterday’s dramatic falls, nothing at all. Still, it is just a trendy way of masking what you are really handing over: money.

Back in 1972, my own uncle, Cliff, suffered no such inhibitions. He was my favourite uncle because he gave me cash for Christmas, usually £20, which seemed a dangerously large sum to my 10-year-old self. I used to think my parents would disapprove. It was almost as if Uncle Cliff was giving me the funds to leave home and set up on my own, so that I might recreate myself in his image. (Cliff was a carefree bachelor who drove a Ford Capri with golf clubs on the back seat.)

Later, after my mum died, Christmas in our house became less ceremonious, and my dad would give me cash. I loved the elegance of the performance. He peeled a couple of twenties off his wad, saying: “And don’t spend it all at once.” He was freeing me, as Cliff had done – not least from the fraught claustrophobia of Christmas itself (because the cash projected one forward in time, towards early January when the money would be spent).

Of course, while an uncle can give a nephew cash, it doesn’t work the other way around. That would imply the uncle didn’t have enough of the stuff to begin with. But most young people, especially in these grim economic times, don’t have enough cash, and don’t care who knows it.

I sometimes try to break away from the wretched Gap top rut by giving quasi cash, say an Amazon gift card, but this carries the message: “Please join me in thraldom to this corporate giant.” It seems most Britons are happy to embrace that servitude.

But this only increases the dark glamour of Christmas cash, as the best sort of givers and receivers surely know.