Just had this teacher gift conversation with my wife, too. I think the gift giving does slowly fade away as elementary school gives way to middle school - As a parent one issue that can be difficult is where to draw the line on which people get gifts, particularly once you get into the realm of day cares, before/after school care, teacher paras, etc. we've currently got 3 kids in elementary school so it's not like just picking up a gift card or two from Starbucks is enough to cover close to double digit people, and it's actually much lower than years where we had to add on before/after school care and preschool/daycare staff when kids were younger. We're very appreciative and glad to have means to make sure they all know we're thinking of them at the holidays, but to me things have changed alot in the last decade -not just for teachers, seems like holiday commercialism has really exploded in effort to push more gifts for many more folks tied to various aspects of our day to days). Particularly compared to when I was in school and the only teacher gifts given out were reminders they all got 3 month paid vacations every summer.