How does Gen Z approach Christmas? How new generations are rewriting the holidays with more authenticity and fewer gifts

The rhetoric of Christmas has always been very simple: comforting songs about snow and fireplaces, ornaments on trees and fairy lights on balconies, gifts, reunited families, the warmth of the domestic hearth, endless lunches and dinners. A reassuring narrative that works very well in advertising and films, but a little less so in real life. Behind the decorated tree and beneath the snow, however, another story is often hidden, one made of anxieties and loneliness that the holidays amplify year after year. And as often happens, it is above all young people who bear this weight, caught between the imperative to be happy and a reality that does not always allow it.

Is Generation Z sadder at Christmas?

As reported by the CISF Family Report 2025, during 2024 60% of the Italian population experienced anxiety or stress, with nearly a quarter stating that they experience them frequently. However, distress is more concentrated among younger people. In the 18–34 age group, 32% say they often suffer from loneliness, compared to 21% among those over 55. A figure that takes on particular weight during the holidays, when the dominant ideal remains that of the large family and conviviality. For many young people, Christmas makes the gap between what one is supposed to experience and what one actually manages to experience even more evident.

Emotional and economic crisis

Alongside the emotional dimension, there is also an economic one. In a context in which, according to the CISF Family Report 2025, over 32.5% of Italian families have reduced spending on personal wellbeing and the home, Christmas represents a moment of strong exposure for Generation Z. The holidays concentrate specific expectations, such as giving gifts, and for a generation that often lives in conditions of precarity, this pressure becomes difficult to sustain. Christmas spending ceases to be a choice or a pleasant moment of thinking about loved ones and takes on the contours of a symbolic obligation, necessary in order not to feel excluded from the ritual.

It is precisely within this tension that Zoomers have reversed course. According to PwC’s Holiday Outlook 2025, Generation Z expects to reduce Christmas budgets by 23%, the most significant cut among all generations. This is not merely a response to a more rigid economic context, but a shift in attitude: reducing spending becomes a way to scale back expectations and to distance oneself from a consumerist model of Christmas that is unsustainable on many levels: environmental, economic and social.

Honouring tradition, Gen Z style

This change of pace does not, however, coincide with a rejection of Christmas. On the contrary, Gen Z is selecting what is worth keeping. The holidays are reimagined as a more intimate and manageable space, with fewer gifts, fewer social obligations and greater attention to simple, shared gestures. Cooking together, decorating the home without excess, spending time with a small circle of chosen people becomes a way to restore meaning to traditions by emptying them of their performative and consumerist components.

Christmas 2025 will present itself like all Christmases past: a field of tensions and economic paradoxes, emotional and generational ones. Young people are lonelier, poorer, and suffer from anxiety and stress. In response comes a recovery of genuineness and a renewed sense of community, in order to redefine needs and possibilities. Less materialism, more meaning. Less appearance, more authenticity.