The Feast of St Nicholas is an appropriate moment to think about the exchange of gifts. In the second of her seasonal reflections, Margaret Atkins examines different ways in which the act of giving is understood, and how medieval Christianity was seen as a “bleeding heart” I have recently read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. In one of his many stories of exchanges of gifts in different cultures, he writes of an anthropologist who lived with a band of Bushmen in South Africa. When she left, she gave each of the women in the band a collection of cowrie shells, enough for a necklace, bought in New York and easy therefore to identify. When she returned a year later, she found that the shells had been scattered throughout the extended community. In a culture of gift-exchange, a gift