History of gifts

I admit I am not a history buff...never was my favorite subject in school. But I have been reading a bit in tour books to get ready for our trip to France and realized we did weird things back in the 'old days'.

Take gift giving. We used to give actual presents to people, but recently the gift card has become a very popular item to give people. Back in the old day countries would give huge monumental gifts to each other. For instance the Statue of Liberty...it was a gift to us, the United States. Quite frankly I would not know what to write on that thank you note.

Thank you for the huge statue that we now have to find a place to put, people to ship it there, others to assemble it....etc

Anyway, a lot of the places in the tour books on France talk about how they were built as gifts, or to try and 'smooth the waters' after a certain battle...how odd. We don't do that now-a-days. I wonder what the country size equivalent to the gift card is since we are no longer getting actual gifts....