After my son’s last birthday party, I did an audit of the loot. Fourteen gifts. Within a fortnight, I could account for the whereabouts of three.
Nobody did anything wrong. Every gift was kind, and every gift was plastic, and every gift joined the great migrating landfill that circulates through the bedrooms of this house on its way to a charity bin. My kids are not ungrateful. They are just full. Most kids are.
The gifts that last are the ones
that know the child.
{Tweet that.}
So lately, when the gift-giving occasions roll around, I’ve been asking a different question. Instead of “what would he like,” I’ve started asking “what would still matter in a year.” The list of answers is short, and almost nothing on it comes in a blister pack.
The things that survive in our house all share one quality. They are about the child, in some way. The bedtime book with his name scrawled inside the cover in his own six-year-old hand. The framed photo of her and her cousin, which she has carried between three bedroom rearrangements. Things that hold a piece of their story.
Last Christmas, the grandparents skipped the toy aisle and gave each of our kids a coloring book made from photos of their own year. Their birthday cakes. The tent that collapsed. The cousins’ pool. I will be honest about what happened on Christmas morning: the books were opened, examined for four minutes, and set aside for something with batteries. I braced myself to be philosophical about it.
Then January happened. The battery thing broke, as battery things do, and one rainy afternoon the books came off the shelf, and that was that. They colored their own year, page by page, right through the summer holidays. The books are still going. They have survived eight months, which in toy years is roughly a century.
Watching a child color a picture of her own birthday cake is a strange and lovely thing. It is somewhere between play and remembering. No toy in the house can do it.
Christmas is a way off yet, but if you are the type who likes to solve gifts early, solve them with something that knows the child. The plastic will not be missed. There is plenty in circulation already.
An Outline Origins book is made from your photos, of your people, doing the things they actually did. If you need a gift for a child who has everything, give them their own year in pages. Books start at $39, and grandparents report a suspicious urge to keep one for themselves.
