A Guide to Holiday Tipping This Year

Tipping during the holidays is a time-honored tradition, but because there are no hard and fast rules, it can end up being one more stressful holiday chore. Here are some suggestions from etiquette and tipping experts to reduce some of the worry.

“There is no authority that sets the norms,” said Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration who has studied tipping.

Tipping service workers has centuries-old roots, and may have emerged as a way for tavern patrons to “forestall envy” while they imbibed, Professor Lynn said. Customers didn’t want the workers to resent their carousing, “so they said, ‘Here’s some money to have a drink later.’” (In many countries, he said, the word for a tip incorporates drinking. For instance, the French term for a gratuity, he noted, is “pourboire,” or roughly translated, “for drink.”)

Formal research on holiday tipping is scant, he said, but generally, seasonal tips are geared toward “people you don’t normally tip, but with whom you interact a lot.”

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