If you have more stuff than you can poke a stick at, you might prefer to ask your guests to give some or all of your wedding gifts to your favourite charities.

Justgive.org which teamed up with the I Do Foundation in November 2009, has a Wedding Center section that allows you to create your own wedding page and customise it with (cash) gifts given to your charity. Guests can donate through the registry or make a donation in your name.

You could ask for all of your gifts to go to one charity in particular to increase the donation pile, or you could pick and mix ones which take your fancy – maybe even create a parallel version of what you would normally request on a wedding registry.

Instead of kitchen utensils what about raising funds for a soup kitchen? Say no to techie gifts like iPads, and help kids to get in the know through schoolbooks in a developing country. Forget asking for a water filter – make sure people in impoverished areas have access to clean drinking water. Or replace your wish for a 3D-TV with a donation to the guide dogs…

If your Christmas gift from Aunt Samantha, Uncle Wayne or perhaps your parents seems suspiciously “used”, with tags missing, the clothing rumpled and non-starched or that “new” smell missing, it’s quite possible they’ve regifted it.

A survey of more than 1,100 Baby Boomers by New Zealand website Grownups.co.nz found that almost 50% of respondents felt there was nothing wrong with regifting unwanted presents (yeah right, they were sooooo good that they had to pass them on).

I don’t know when Oldtimers Disease kicks in but amazingly, 66% of respondents (aged 44-64) admitted to forgetting to buy a Christmas gift for their partner! Arghhh!!! I hope they didn’t get themselves out of the doghouse by regifting what their partner gave them back to their long-suffering other half…

But to make up for this, they are particularly generous to charity with 28% giving at Christmas-time and a further 59% giving money to charity throughout the year.

If you’d like to spend $US29.99 and get $US799.01 of gift certificates, rebates and discounts in return, read on!

An amazing new initiative which is helping to raise money for the American Cancer Society until 14 October, enables you to buy discounts and gift certificates worth hundreds of dollars from such retailers as Gap, Skype, 1-800.flowers.com, Nordstrom, TripIt, Shoebuy.com and so on.

Called the Big Bundle, this one purchase could cover quite a few of your Christmas gift list. You could give, for example, a $25 Restaurant.com gift certificate to a colleague, save $20 off flowers at 1-800.flowers.com for your grandmother, “buy” a free domain from GoDaddy for your IT-addicted teen, and $50 off a three-night stay at Hotel.com for you and your partner.

But you’d better make sure you take advantage of them as some of these offers expire during October…

For those of you about getting married, this new gift registry could suit you like a 10-carat ring from Tiffany’s.

While it’s not the first online gift registry to let you add items from any store, nor probably to allow you to donate to charity nor even to request cash gifts (which is uh, difficult to do at the best of times), It’s My Gift Registry is the first gift registry I’ve seen that also provides free party planning features for hosting low-key weddings, bridal showers, baby showers, or birthdays at home, etc.

The Party Checklist lets your guests see everything from your gift (wish)list,  to checking off the food and drinks they’ll be bringing. Which certainly stops those awkward now-we’ve-got-7-barbecue-chickens-and-no-salads dilemmas and lets you know if your Nigella Lawson-level cooking buddy will be bringing her famous cupcakes or not.

Did you know about 27% of people who get gift certificates and gift cards don’t redeem them? That’s a lot of wasted money and effort on behalf of the person who bought them the voucher.

I can think of only one gift certificate I didn’t use and it was for a pedicure at the local beauty salon. Unfortunately my birthday is in winter and I just didn’t fancy freezing my toes off in flip-flops for four hours to keep my OPI polish free of woolly sock prints! So I let it lapse. Arghhh. Boy, did I feel bad (and my toes didn’t look too great either).

So, what you do about gift certificates that can be unsuitable?

1. Contact the retailer or website in plenty of time before the certificate expires to ask if you can swap it for another item of the same or lesser value (I could have used it towards a luxurious facial, but it didn’t occur to me at the time).

2. Regift it to someone else. (Ah, not to state the obvious, but you can really only get away with this by regifting gift cards and pre-printed gift certificates without your name on it.)

3. Sell it on eBay – there are plenty of people flogging unwanted gift certificates for a little cash on the side (Aunt Mary might be a bit upset, however).

4. Donate the gift certificate to a registered charity.

5.  Redeem the gift certificate so it doesn’t expire and offer the resulting manicure booking/jewellery/movie tickets/tacky lingerie etc as a door prize for a business networking function or as part of an auction line-up for a community raffle. Costs you nothing and ensures it’s not entirely wasted.

One of the more intriguing offers I’ve seen is this wonderful win-win idea to help charities benefit from people giving their time and to help fill hotels which are still suffering thanks to the GFC.

Donate 8 hours (one day) of your valuable time to community service and you can receive a complimentary night (or 50% off) your room at 53 Sage hotels across the US. Some of these hotels under the Sage banner include Marriott, Sheraton, and the Hilton Garden Inn.

The charity needs to be a registered 501(c)3 non profit organization but hey – a free night! That could be great as as add-on or as part of a special anniversary, birthday or engagement gift.

The offer ends 20 December 2009.

Many (if not most) retailers who sell gift cards don’t give you back the cash on your unused portion.

So if you got a $50 gift card from Grandma to spend at say, Amazon, and you bought a book for $39.95, you’d have $10.05 left over. Which isn’t enough to buy really anything else once shipping’s added unless you spend more money, so it’s pretty common that it goes unspent. And you’re left thinking, what a waste!

One clever US website at www.giftcardonor.com allows you to select from a long list of American retailers, enter the amount/s owing (if you have a few not-fully-used gift cards), the state you live in and voila! You see a list of potential charities that you can donate the remaining money to.

But best of ALL, you can buy the gift cards there too – at a discount! Again, there’s a big list of well-known retailers that make available gift cards (perhaps they were left over from a promotion or have much shorter expiry dates, for example). So, I selected one of my favourites, Williams-Sonoma – and it was 15% off. These cheap gift cards range from 1-2% to 40% off the value remaining on the gift cards which means most of them have strange, not-rounded off amounts – like one I saw with a value of $US293.25 selling for $US249.26. 

Like eBay, you can also sell your unwanted or partially used gift cards and receive cash for them, but this website is the first one I’ve seen that you can actually donate the proceeds to charity.

There are a lot of people – my sister is one of them – who’s prepared to give a birthday gift, but doesn’t like the commercialism of Christmas gift-giving.

In 2004, Kirsten paid for a pig in a Third World country for Dad as his Christmas gift (yes he is an Aquarius, but since he has a few planets in Capricorn, he’ll never be as hippie-ish as she’d wish). So while he wasn’t particularly thrilled that he’d bought Babe for someone else, if you want your gifts to DO something for people (regardless of your Sun sign), there are heaps of options, with Oxfam being one of the best-known organisations for helping to support people in developing countries.

Another I recently discovered is Goodshop.com. At this fantastic US website, which lists more than 1,000 stores, up to 30% of your gift purchase will go to your favorite cause. It lists stores specialising in arts, crafts and hobbies through to travel and everything in between. 

You simply select your chosen charity (I entered the Salvation Army as an experiment) and selected the Gifts & Flowers category. There you’ll find all the websites listed with their donation amounts, with the highest in that category (6-10%) belonging to gift retailer Uncommon Goods. In the Computer Hardware & Electronics section (hey, techie gifts appeal to many Aquarians!), buying toner from 123 Inkjets will create a 14% donation of your purchase price.

It really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Ever wondered why your Nanna seems to support all those charities? This may explain it.

A study by researchers at US Penn State University has found that men are more likely to give money to a needy person in their neighborhood – if they gave at all. Men tend to think of what’s affecting them in their immediate vicinity.

Women on the other hand, are equally likely to give money to needy people (aka charities) in their neighbourhood and overseas AND to give equal amounts to both groups.  Charities know this and lurrrrrve targeting females for donations.

The study tested both genders for donating to groups based on proximity or common ethnicity (ie “my people”) and based on humanity and suffering (far away). People could a) keep the cash, b) give it to victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or c) victims of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The survey also tested participants’ “moral identities” (or how much they identified themselves as fair, honest, caring, fair etc).

Women with high moral identities were more likely to split their donation equally between both charities. Women with lower moral identies and men with high moral identities gave more to the Hurricane Katrina group and much less to the tsunami charity.

Men with low moral identities pocketed the cash.