Google Trends is a nifty tool that allows you to see the relatve frequency with which a search term appears historically in Google searches. Google Trends shows this frequency map for the term “gift cards”

This pretty much tells us what we alrady know, gift cards are HUGELY a holiday phenomonon and have been steadily growing. Notice however that over the last holiday season, less overall searches for gift cards. The three other smaller spikes that have appears in the last four years look suspiciously like Valentines day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s day.