The Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson (The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1951) opens with a spaceship landing on a planet to celebrate Christmas; two of the crew are later sent to a nearby village to greet the humans that settled there previously and invite them to the ship.
En-route the pair are met by the natives, who proffer gifts, and a voice from the sleigh tells them to destroy the gifts and hand over their pistols. After some reluctance the two crew members do so, whereupon the natives break the pistols into pieces. Then they discover that the man who spoke is a recent arrival called Reynolds, who they subsequently take back with them.
The rest of the story consists (apart from another bookend to finish the story) of Reynolds telling of how he came to be on the planet, which starts with him arriving after he damaged his spaceship tubes. While he was trying to repair his ship the natives arrived, and he was drawn into their strange gift giving custom (which is later explained by a friendly female tribe member called Ruth):
She thought for a minute, trying to find a way to phrase it. “We use our coppers and furs in duels,” she said slowly. “Perhaps one chief will give a feast for another and present him with many coppers and blankets. Unless the other chief destroys the gifts and gives a feast in return, at which he presents the first chief with even greater gifts, he loses honor.”
He was beginning to see, Reynolds thought. The custom of conspicuous waste, to show how wealthy the possessor was. Enemies dueled with property, instead of with pistols, and the duel would obviously go back and forth until one or the other of its participants was bankrupt—or unwilling to risk more goods. A rather appropriate custom for a planet as lush as this.
“What if one of the chiefs goes broke,” he said, explaining the term.
“If the winning chief demands it, the other can be put to death. He is forced to drink the Last Cup, a poison which turns his bones to jelly. The days go by and he gets weaker and softer until finally he is nothing but a—ball.” She described this with a good deal of hand waving and facial animation, which Reynolds found singularly attractive in spite of the gruesomeness of the topic.
This unlikely gimmick works through a few gift-exchange plot loops until (spoiler) Reynolds runs out of potential gifts, and also realises that Ruth is also going to be poisoned for helping him. He avoids this unpleasant end by giving the impression that he is going to destroy the planet with fire (I think) after they destroy his rocket. The chief concedes before the oil fire Reynolds previously set burns out.
There is another twist revealed at the end (when Reynolds is once again on the visiting ship): Reynolds married Ruth and became the wealthiest man on the planet because they had 15 children, each of which attracted ever-increasing dowries.
This story revolves around an unconvincing and contrived gimmick, the ending is a fudge, and the last twist just adds even more nonsense to what has come before (and seems to be the only reason the sections that book-end the piece are there). Why Bleiler and Dikty (the editors of the ‘Best of the Year’ anthology where this first appeared) thought it a good idea to use this original story beats me (and I can only assume Terry Carr reprinted it1 for Towering Inferno2 name recognition).
* (Mediocre). 8,500 words.
1. Terry Carr used this story in his Christmas SF anthology, To Follow a Star (1977).
2. The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson (1974) was made into a big-budget disaster film called The Towering Inferno (1974), more here.