How to Pick Excellent Gifts
gift-choosing tips (including budget ones)
Comments are open for paid subscribers until I go to bed on Sunday, November 24 and will re-open after work on Wednesday, November 27 and stay open over the long Thanksgiving weekend.
Gifts As An Expression of Love
There is a self-help paradigm called “The 5 Languages of Love.” They have an online test and a variety of books on the topic. It posits that most people have one or two ways that they feel loved most directly and effectively. The languages are Physical Touch, Acts of Service, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, and Receiving Gifts.
This paradigm has a lot of explanatory power. We’ve all known couples, or other relationships, for whom a mismatch of this paradigm explains a lot.
He thinks he’s a wonderful husband because he goes all out for her birthday, Christmas, and their anniversary, with random flowers-for-no-reason throughout the year, when what she desperately wants is more help with the housework or kids. (Receiving Gifts vs Acts of Service.)
She tells him she loves him by keeping a pristine house, making his lunch, and packing his bag for golf Saturdays, when he’d vastly prefer to hear compliments or just hang out with her a little more often. (Acts of Service vs Words of Affirmation or Quality Time.)
Susan thinks she’s a great roommate because she picks up after herself religiously and is always available to give rides; her roommate Allison thinks that Susan is cold and unfriendly because she doesn’t share meals or join movie nights. (Acts of Service vs Quality Time.)
In my opinion — as someone who is screwed up enough to have read nearly every self-help book you can name — the 5 love languages is more helpful and accurate than many self-help paradigms. For most of the people I know well, I think I can identify what makes them feel loved most effectively.
And it certainly applies in my case—Physical Touch is mine by about seventeen orders of magnitude, but Words of Affirmation are my second. For someone who lives alone, hugs are a rare treat, but my memories of people I love and respect saying, “I’m proud of you” are etched into my soul.
If anyone important to you has Receiving Gifts as a love language, or if you are in a situation similar to mine and most of the people you love live far away, shopping for gifts can be an important exercise in strengthening bonds—an “I love you and you matter to me” from a distance, brought to them by the United States Postal Service.
I got good at choosing gifts through a series of events that I’m never going to write about, but the benefit for you all is that I have some helpful tips!
Low Budget Ideas
BOX OF GRATITUDE: get a shoebox-sized box, or slightly bigger if you can find a nice one with a lid. The Walmart art supplies aisle usually has these for a few dollars. Decorate it if you wish, with stickers or just by writing the person’s name in a colored marker. Choose a few small, inexpensive items that represent a quality in the person that you admire. For example, if you appreciate that your father is handy and can fix anything, a roll of Duck Tape or a tape measure might work. Perhaps your little brother has always had an affinity for ducks, or your best friend has mentioned wistfully that she wanted to be an astronaut when she was a girl. A small duck or rocketship come to mind there. Your local art supply/craft store will have a section devoted to miniatures, which is a great place to find these things for very little money. A few of these items, with a handwritten letter explaining their significance, is a beautiful and significant gift. Depending on the items chosen, this one can be done for under $10 — possibly zero dollars, if you already own a box and small items that will represent what you appreciate about the recipient.
CALENDARS: there are page-a-day desk calendars and wall calendars on almost every topic and for almost every television show, movie franchise, and theme imaginable (animals, comic strips, lighthouses, quotes, books, music…). These are typically under $20 and are really nice gifts if you choose the topic well, since the recipient will enjoy something that they’re interested in and care about every single day in the new year. Bookstores generally stock these during December in great abundance.
COUPON BOOK: this is ideal for someone whose love language is Quality Time, but also good for anyone whose company you genuinely enjoy. You can download coupon templates by doing a google image search, or make them yourself out of index cards or cardstock from the art supply store. Decorate with stickers or not at all. Make a few coupons for things the recipient will enjoy or appreciate. 3 hours of babysitting for a single parent friend, going out to dinner for almost anyone, or a random favor for a friend who you know struggles to ask for needed help. If the recipient has ever wished they knew something you know, a coupon for a lesson is a great idea. A coupon for a drawing lesson that I gave someone for Christmas in 2016 turned into a lovely friendship that lasted most of college.
PLAYLIST: this one only requires time. Make a private YouTube playlist on a topic of interest to the recipient. The commercials of a shared childhood are likely on YouTube, along with music, lectures on topics of interest, historical news segments on events with which you have a shared memory.
To Repair A Broken Relationship
One of the best ways I’ve seen to get people talking again is to try to find common ground. If you, like so many of us, have lost a friendship or relationship with a family member to political differences in the last few years, if you think it might be salvageable—consider reaching out with a Christmas card and a coupon inside offering to read, and discuss with them, a book of their choosing.
Other Tips
The most important part of choosing a gift is choosing something that the person will love for its own sake, but that also shows that they matter to you—you noticed their love, affinity, or interest in the subject of the gift, or you noticed that they need something that perhaps they might struggle to give themselves.
One of the best gifts I ever received was a stuffed dragon. It took me a long time to get over my ego enough to buy myself the teddy bear I always wanted when I was a kid, and I probably wouldn’t have ever done it if I hadn’t been given Sparkle first.
Speaking of bears, and stuffed animals more generally, the Build-a-Bear company has all kinds of accessories for stuffed animals. If you might buy a stuffed animal for someone in your life and they use a wheelchair, an insulin pump, hearing aids, or other medical assistance devices, you can get them an animal like them. Here’s my teddy bear, Liam, who uses hearing aids.
Shopping online makes it easier than ever to find really good gifts in any niche you can imagine. Go to Etsy, Zazzle, or Amazon and put random words together, and you’ll be amazed at what will turn up.
I’ve found mathematical Christmas tree ornaments, Golden Girls kitchen utensils, Star Trek everything, and LEGO sets on almost every conceivable theme.
Print-on-demand services are everywhere now, and you can find something perfect for almost any niche—if you know to look. For example, I love mathematics and decorating for holidays. I found some amazing hoodies with Halloween math jokes and Christmas math jokes on Amazon just by searching “Halloween math hoodie” and “Christmas math hoodie.”
Etsy and other sites sell more than crafts—they are sites where many small businesses operate on a variety of themes, including hard-to-find autographs and custom-made items. You can have a photo of a child or pet turned into an ornament, t-shirt, or calendar. Many sites allow you to upload your smartphone pics and turn them into amazing gifts with ease, including Mpix, with which I have personally had only good experiences.
Is your Star Trek nerd brother a good cook who doesn’t do it very often? Etsy has the perfect thing for him.
A friend introduced me to the show “Breaking Bad” in 2022, which is flatly amazing. I found a signed copy of the pilot, from a reputable autograph dealer, for under $25. He’d never buy it for himself, but I think he has loved owning it, and it’s a reminder of a special experience we shared.
Check out a friend’s bookshelf and if you see any author more than once, you can probably get an autographed copy a lot cheaper than you think—often from the author him/herself, by asking on social media.
If Someone Truly Has Everything
If someone truly has everything, then a donation in their name, to a cause related to something they care about, can be a meaningful gift.
Is your stoic grandpa a military veteran? There are many scholarship-providing charities for the children of fallen soldiers.
Does your prickly mother-in-law always complain about how ugly modern architecture is? A gift to an historical preservation society in her name might signal respect for her views and make it harder for her to complain on Christmas morning.
Choosing Gifts Is A Skill
If it’s one that you’ve never developed very much, I hope this has helped!
May the coming holiday season be a blessing to you all.
Here’s the Christmas Canon, performed by Trans-Siberian Orchestra and a children’s choir. (I suggest having Kleenex at the ready.)
Paid subscriptions go to helping me pay off my student loans, and I’m offering a Black Friday sale at this link. This post was an edited and expanded version of a gift-choosing guide that was paywalled in 2022 and 2023, so it’s sort of a sample of the kind of thing I write for paid subscribers, in addition to my series on How to Not Suck At Math and my creative writing series, which has descriptions, experiments, and personal stories.
I listen to my wife, and make things appear that she has mentioned in passing. A dress that she liked but didn’t want to spend the money on, a literal shit ton of tape measures (Stanley fat max 16’) as she complained she could never find hers or making dinner of something she mentioned in passing (beef Wellington, once).
So far it seems to work.
The only person I have ever been good at buying gifts for was my Dad - probably because we are very alike, so I'd get things I'd like. Dad was in parliament during the Fraser years, and knew Howard reasonably well. When his biography came out, I cued up my oldest son to get to a signingin Sydney. He identified himself, so got a personal message from Howard, who also had fond memories of Dad. I'm not sure Dad ever read it, but was tickled to have it!