The list always comes late. Somebody asks what you want in the second week of December, you say you honestly don't know, and a week later a scented candle arrives.
We assumed that was just how gifting goes. Then we counted, and the shape of it turned out to be sharper and stranger than the feeling.
What we counted
We read the titles of 39,116 wishlists created on Wishes over the two years to September 2026, and grouped them by the occasion named in the title: Christmas, birthday, wedding, baby shower, and everything with no occasion in the name at all. Then we counted how many were made in each month, how many wishes ended up on them, and how often somebody other than the list's owner opened them.
No list contents, no names, no individual accounts. Monthly counts and averages, nothing else. These are our own numbers from our own app, which is both what makes them worth reading and what limits them, and we've put the limits at the end rather than in the footnotes.
Christmas list-making swings by a factor of 181
Between its quietest month of the year and its busiest, the number of Christmas-titled lists made on Wishes moves 181x. Nothing else in our data behaves like that. Birthdays wobble. Christmas detonates.
And the peak is November, not December. The month most people think of as gift season is already the back half of the curve by the time it starts.
The buying starts before the asking does
Put our November peak next to what retail research says about shoppers and a gap opens up.
The National Retail Federation's own summary of the last several holiday seasons is that approximately two out of every five holiday shoppers have started browsing and buying before November, which is why retailers now run holiday sale events in October. Optimove's Holiday Shopping Report 2026, a survey of 648 US consumers taken this spring, found 66% willing to begin somewhere between July and October.
So there is a window, roughly October, where a large share of gift-givers are already shopping and the person they're shopping for hasn't said a word yet. That's not a scheduling problem. That's the whole origin story of the wrong gift.
Birthdays are the part nobody writes about
Christmas gets the headlines because it spikes. Birthdays get the volume because they never stop.
Birthday lists on Wishes run between 149 and 525 a month, every month, and from January through August they outnumber Christmas lists by 3x to 25x. For two-thirds of the calendar, the birthday list is the gift list. It just never produces a season, so nobody builds a campaign around it.
Naming the occasion changes what the list becomes
This is the finding that surprised us most. Lists that say what they're for are different lists.
| What the list is called | Average wishes on it |
|---|---|
| Christmas | 5.56 |
| Birthday | 4.56 |
| No occasion in the title | 3.50 |
A Christmas-titled list carries 59% more wishes than an untitled one, and a birthday list 30% more. An occasion-named list is also nearly twice as likely to be opened by somebody other than the person who made it.
We can't tell you which way that runs. It's plausible that naming an occasion makes you think harder and share sooner, and equally plausible that people who already had a real occasion in mind are the ones who bother to name it. What we can say is that the two go together consistently, and that typing "Christmas 2026" instead of "stuff" costs nothing. With Wishes you can save gift ideas from any store, add notes for sizes or colors, and share the list with one link that opens in a browser with nothing to install, so the naming is genuinely the only part that takes thought.
Weddings and baby showers are rarer than the internet thinks
Search the phrase "gift registry" and you'll conclude that registries are what wishlists are for. In our corpus, wedding and baby lists together are 84 of 39,116, or 0.2%.
They matter enormously to the people making them, and we keep wedding and baby pages because of it. But the everyday gift list, made for a birthday or for no stated reason at all, is the overwhelming majority of what actually gets made.
What to do with this, if you're the one making the list
- Make it in October. Most Christmas lists on Wishes get made in November, and two out of five of the people buying for you started before that. October is the month where the list still changes what gets bought.
- Say what it's for. "Christmas 2026" and "Mom's 60th" do more work than the title suggests, and our numbers say those lists end up longer and more widely opened.
- Keep one running list for the year. Birthdays don't cluster, which means the useful list is the one you add to whenever you notice something, not the one you build in a panic in a single evening.
- Share it before anyone asks. The awkward version is being asked. The easy version is a link somebody already has.
- Let people book things. The duplicate gift is a coordination failure, not a taste failure, and it's fixed by the list knowing what's already taken.
What this data can't tell you
It's one app's numbers. Everyone in it chose to use a wishlist app, which is not a neutral sample of gift-givers, and our audience skews to the countries and age groups our app reached first. Occasion is read from the title a person typed, so a Christmas list called "December" counts as unnamed and a list called "Christmas" that turned out to be for a birthday counts as Christmas.
The averages are averages, and a list with 40 wishes on it pulls them. And two years is two years: it's enough to see a seasonal shape repeat, not enough to call it a trend.
We'd rather say that plainly than dress up a house dataset as the state of gifting. If you want to cite any of this, cite it as what it is: 39,116 wishlists made on Wishes over the two years to September 2026.
Start your list
The gap between what people want and what they get isn't a mystery. It's a timing problem with a one-minute fix, and the fix is saying the thing out loud in October instead of hoping somebody guesses in December.
Make a wishlist for whatever's next, whether that's a birthday, a wedding, a baby shower or Christmas. Wishes is free on iPhone and Android, a list takes a minute, and it shares with one link. Get the app, or start in your browser and add to it all year.
