Passage 1 Among the throngs of Americans prowling the malls and trawling e-commerce sites, many are looking out for themselves. Retail-research firm NPD Group said, thus far, about one third of consumers have engaged in what is called self-gifting. That's up from 12 percent in a typical pre- recession year, and up from the 19 percent who said they planned to do so last year. The National Retail Federation, the dispenser of all holiday-related data, said in 2012, nearly 60 percent of shoppers would do so. The latest step in the evolution of our burgeoning culture of narcissism? Yes. Self-gifting makes psychological and economic sense given what Americans have endured these years. THE POST-BUST(破产) era has been a long, hard, heroic slog of balance-sheet improvement. Americans have labored to save money and hack away at the huge mountain of debt they accumulated during the credit boom. According to the New York Federal Reserve, consumers have knocked down theiraggregate debt load from $12.67 trillion in the third quarter of 2008 to $11.31 trillion in the third quarter of 2012; credit-card debt is off $192 billion from the peak. Americans have cut their load by spending more carefully and engaging in that most un-American of traits: self-abnegation. After living frugally for so much of the year and for so many years who can blame a parent at an Apple Store for buying herself a new iPad? Indeed, self-gifting may actually be a function of the new abstemiousness. Let's say you’ve been holding off on replacing your old television. Why not buy it around November or December when insane promotions and free shipping are available? Besides, it's not like self-gifters are solely interested in self-pleasure. An NRF survey said that the typical self-gifter would spend about $140 on himself this year. For comparison's sake, the survey said the typical shopper would spent about $750 in all. After a long period of economic madness (remember the housing bubble and the dotcom mess), self-gifting is a sign of much-needed economic rationality. Shopping for others involves a certain amount of wrong guesswork with negative financial consequence. This year, for example, CEB TowerGroup claims that Americans will load $110 billion onto gift cards and givethem as presents. But the market-research firm says that about l.6 percent of that total, about $1.7 billion, will go unused. Meanwhile, a large percentage of gifts wind up getting returned. Adults surveyed by BIG insight in November 2012 found that 35 percent of people reported returning at least some of their gifts. Returns induce guilt and raise the specter of uncomfortable conversations about what happened to that giant striped sweater. But more significant, returns are bad for the environment. They lead to more trips to the mall, higher shipping costs, and the unnecessary use of packaging materials. These days, the rise of e-commerce means shopping is now antiseptic: sit and click. With the charm gone, we have to come up with other ways to make the experience pleasurable. As the song goes, "Have yourself a merry little Christmas.