I want the same thing that I have asked for for the last decade. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I have requested that all friends and family, if they feel obligated to give a gift (and I emphasize that I would prefer nothing), give me tax receipts for donations to Amnesty, Feed Nova Scotia, Oxfam or Plan Canada.
However, last year my brother got me this, which was apropos to his sense of irony:
http://www.amazon.ca/Scroogenomics-W.../dp/0691142645#_
The book makes a great case. If I am going to spend $X on you and you are going to spend $X on me, we would have been better off keeping our $X and spending it on things we REALLY need. His case was how many people would have purchased that singing bass for themselves? Mostly they were bought as silly Christmas gifts. We end up putting our economic resources into things with little utility, certainly less utility than what we ourselves would purchase for ourselves. It is a very rare case where someone else knows my needs better than I do. Sometimes that's untrue... my brother, sister-in-law and I pooled our money last year and bought my mother an iPad. She would never have bought one herself, but now she can't live without it. But that is the exception rather than the rule. I thought the book rather thought provoking.
Originally I rejected gifts because I have a great distain for the commercialization of the season. But he made an excellent economic argument against gift-giving/receiving.