Most families exchange sweaters or candles at Christmas. Warren Buffett handed out investing lessons wrapped in stock certificates.
For years, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman went the traditional route with a decidedly untraditional amount: $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills for each family member. But as Mary Buffett, his former daughter-in-law, told ThinkAdvisor in 2019, the results were predictable. "He would always give each of us $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills. As soon as we got home, we'd spend it — whooo!"
Mary was married to Buffett's son Peter from 1980 to 1993, and she remembers those cash-filled Christmases vividly. The problem was obvious: the money disappeared faster than anyone could track it. So Buffett did what he does best. He changed the game.
"One Christmas there was an envelope with a letter from him," Mary recalled. "Instead of cash, he'd given us $10,000 worth of shares in a company he'd recently bought, a trust Coca-Cola had. He said to either cash them in or keep them."
Mary kept them. And that decision proved exactly what Buffett was trying to teach. "I thought, 'Well, [this stock] is worth more than $10,000.' So I kept it, and it kept going up."
From that point forward, the pattern repeated. "Then, every year when he'd give us stock — Wells Fargo being one of them — I would just buy more of it because I knew it was going to go up," she said. The message was crystal clear: cash gets spent, but ownership builds wealth.
The math tells the story. Wells Fargo traded around $1 per share in 1990. Today it hovers near $85. A single $10,000 gift back then would have bought about 10,000 shares, now worth roughly $850,000 before dividends. Stack multiple years of those gifts together, and you're looking at millions in compounded value.
This wasn't just generous gift-giving. It was Warren Buffett being Warren Buffett, even at home. Mary described how investing dominated every family gathering. "That's all he talked about!" she said. When the family met in Laguna during the holidays, business luminaries would join, "and they'd all talk about companies. Investing was the only thing Warren ever talked about!"
Those conversations changed Mary's career trajectory entirely. She went from working at Columbia Records and in Hugh Hefner's music publishing companies to writing bestselling investment books. Her first, "Buffettology," translated Buffett's investment philosophy for everyday readers. She absorbed his principles: buy understandable businesses, avoid IPOs, stay away from companies dependent on constant research and development just to survive.
The Christmas stock tradition fits perfectly into that worldview. Buffett wasn't trying to impress anyone with flashy gifts. He was demonstrating, in the most practical way possible, how real wealth gets built. Not through spending, but through ownership and patience.
Yes, receiving $10,000 in crisp hundreds is memorable. But Buffett understood something deeper: that money would be gone in weeks or months. Stock ownership, on the other hand, compounds. It grows. It teaches discipline. And it keeps working long after the holiday decorations come down.
Not everyone has a billionaire relative handing out stock certificates each December. But the principle applies universally. Working with a financial advisor can help families create their own version of this strategy — building long-term investment plans, choosing assets that align with their goals, and creating the kind of steady compounding that turns small gifts into significant wealth over time.
The best gifts, it turns out, aren't always the ones that make you smile on Christmas morning. Sometimes they're the ones still growing decades later.