Skip to main content

Great small gifts

Image
By
Often Christmas is about more, more, more. More spending, more gifts, more stuff. It's tricky for the person who is happy with less stuff.

Three cheers for my family

My loved ones have done exceedingly well this year. All the gifts I received on Christmas day could fit in one envelope - not including those that fitted in my stomach ;) .

My free e-book 10 Great Gifts for People who Don't Want Stuff has a great range of gift ideas. Here are specific examples that are giving me joy rather than clutter.

Hand-made gifts

It's an unexpected treat to get something someone has put their time into making.

A friend (and her 8 and 6 year old daughters) made us this collection of soaps. We'll appreciate them as we use them up.


Held up to the light, they're amazingly colourful and bright. Even the bag they came in (courtesy of the kids) was fantastically cute.


Vouchers

Vouchers can be hit and miss. The tip is to go broad if you don't know the person well. Only go for a specific niche if you're dead sure that's what they want. Otherwise it's just a gift to the corporation as the voucher sits unused.

The hardware store voucher I received might normally have missed the mark but our new apartment could do with some energy-saving lights. The broadness of the voucher saved the day and made it a gift that is appreciated.

Experience

A book of 35 walks in my city. Yeah it's a physical present but relatively small and should provide a great number of experiences for my wife and I. Some of the places I haven't even heard of yet. It's like a little "lonely planet" guide for my own city.

Experiences are great because they create memories. Memories are great because they last a very long time - and often get better with age.

My wife knows this well and gave me a voucher for an activity we'll do together (more on that another time). My sister-in-law and brother-in-law gave us a voucher for sports tickets. They go to almost every Brisbane Lions home game. It's our choice which one we attend as their guests. (Update: Here's how it went.)

Food

My sister is very generous with presents. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. This year she combined generosity with her baking skills to cook up a storm. Great idea.

She fills those containers to the max. Whatever it doesn't have in fancy-schmancy presentation it makes up for in quantity and sweetness.


Also in food category, my wife made us a special Christmas brunch before we went out to the extended family Christmas event. No photo of that - I went straight for the cutlery before the camera ;)

Focusing on joy

The traditional (commercial) image of Christmas is a giant tree surrounded with large shiny presents wrapped with a bow. You see it at the shopping centre and on practically every Christmas movie.

These presents might not fit that expectation. But they bring more joy. Isn't that what counts?

PS. You may also want to read about my extended family's new tradition about gifts.
Read more about:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to do with 128 pens?

By
I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...
2 comments
Read more

How to waste a year's wages

By
A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...
4 comments
Read more

Why millionaires don't "feel" rich

By
We're wealthier than ever - so why don't we feel like it? Australia has gone almost three decades without recession. The stock market recently hit a record high. Our wages are record highs. Home loan rates are at record lows. We live in one of the richest countries in the world at the richest point in history. So what's wrong? Comparison Wealth is relative. So what do we compare to? Where we expect to be? "When your wages growth is only 2 or 3 per cent, you don't feel as well-off as when it's going up 10 per cent. That's that nominal distortion that people often suffer from" , says economist Shane Oliver, and that "expectations have grown a lot faster than reality." We're earning more than last year, but we want even more. So compared to our imaginary situation, we see ourselves as worse off. What we see around us? Shane Oliver again. "If you think about it - Australians today are a lot wealthier. They're living far ric...
4 comments
Read more