Last week, as part of our ongoing Survey of Affluence and Wealth, in partnership with Time Inc., we announced our 2014 Holiday Gift Giving Forecast, which indicates that we are looking at significant growth in holiday gift giving across the board.

Just one quick note for clarity: we divide the world between the 10% at the top of the economy and the 90% below $125,000 in household income.

Gift spending among the 90% will be up 10% this year to $594, as a rising tide of employment begins to lift many boats. Additionally, spending among the top 10% is also expected to increase by 6%, from $1,818 to $1,920 per household. It should be a jolly holiday for America’s merchants as consumers across all income classes hit their keyboards, their smartphones and their feet for deals.

In the face of a generally positive forecast for the holiday season, we did notice one peculiarity. We noted with some curiosity that while overall spending on gifts per household will be up 10% to an average of $736 per household (across all households), the dollar value of that spending is only up 8.7%. We thought we had erred in our calculations, but we discovered that they were absolutely correct. The 1.3% gap between the families’ gift budgets and the cumulative dollar value of those gifts – a total of $77.5 billion - is accounted for by a trend we hadn’t recognized. Every year for the past three years, the number of households that participate in holiday gift giving (and this doesn’t mean that they don’t participate in other holiday activities) has been declining by roughly 1% per year.

This year the number of families that have dropped out of gift-giving across the board has declined by 1.3% or approximately 1.5 million households. These families collectively represent a decline of $950 million dollars in gift giving. Since, as any economist would agree, the most profitable dollar is the last dollar, this decline in dollar value puts significant pressure on profitability and help account for the inventory problems that bedevil holiday merchandisers and drive discounting, which complicates optimizing revenues. Furthermore, the percentage of households that participate in gift giving has dropped from what we believe was around 97% in 2007 to 93.1% this year. If we measure this in 2014 dollars, that is a $6.4 billion in gift giving purchasing lost forever.

We recognize that holiday spending fundamentally changed as a result of the recession. Business gifts are a thing of the past. Holiday parties - especially office parties - have declined and have not come back. Purchasing decorations is up as people try to get into the festive spirit, but gift-giving is increasingly concentrated on gifts – and gift cards - of specific meaning to loved ones. The point is holidays are being transformed and it appears, as small as this trend is right now, that gifts are declining as an essential component of the holiday experience.

It’s interesting to note that Millennials have become the most “traditional” of all holiday shoppers. More than 60% (about twice any other generation) take pleasure in the store experience—so much so that we now refer to store environments as a social medium. To them, the trip to the mall during the holidays is more than just about shopping, it also a communal experience that they share with their friends, an experience for which they place significant value. So despite the preponderance of traditional shopping, it’s not traditional at all. It’s part of a trend—in some ways a very good trend—in which an objective of the holidays is to celebrate the joys of active relationships, friends and family – though not necessarily with a gift exchange as the focal point of these interactions.

Merchandisers and holiday marketers might want to pay attention to this because in a couple of years, if things keep going the way they are going, we may be looking at an epidemic ba-hum-buggery. For the record we’re not really talking about the aggressiveness of Scrooge, we’re talking about the importance of that turkey to the Cratchits.

Less gifts, more love, indeed?