27 July 2026
They tell you not to get them anything. They have a house full of things. Buying for your children at thirty-seven is genuinely harder than it was at seven.
There is a kind of Christmas shopping that gets harder every year, and it is buying for your own children once they have grown up.
At seven it was easy. At thirty-seven they have a job, a house and everything they need, and when you ask they say please do not get me anything. So you get a candle, or a jumper in a colour they might wear, or a voucher. Everyone is perfectly pleasant about it and by February nobody can remember what was given.
What adults actually keep
Think about the presents you have kept from the last twenty years. Very few were expensive. What they had in common is that somebody had to think about you specifically in order to buy them.
The ones that survive tend to be one of these:
- Something with their own life in it. Photographs, letters, a recipe in your handwriting.
- Something they want and would never spend the money on themselves. Everyone has a small extravagance they cannot quite justify.
- Something that took effort rather than money. This is the one that lands hardest and costs the least.
- Something useful they did not know existed. Hard to find, and the one that gets mentioned to other people.
Candles, socks and vouchers are none of these. They are polite, they are safe, and they are gone by spring.
Some ideas that are not from us
A page of gift ideas where every idea is the same gift is no use to anybody, so:
- A year of something. A magazine they would genuinely read, a coffee subscription, membership to a place they already go.
- The good version of something they own a cheap version of. A proper kitchen knife. A decent umbrella. A doormat that works.
- Time, in writing, with dates on it. A weekend of childcare beats anything you can buy for parents of small children.
- Your handwriting. A recipe they grew up on, written out on a card. Costs nothing and people keep them for the rest of their lives.
- The photographs you have and they have never seen. Most people over sixty have boxes of pictures their children have no idea exist.
Why photographs work so well for this
Their generation has taken more photographs of their own children than any generation in history and printed almost none of them. It is the same problem as the boxes in your loft, only worse, because at least the boxes exist as objects.
A book of their own year is an awkward present to describe and an easy one to get right. It is about them, it obviously took thought, and it is exactly the sort of thing nobody buys for themselves because it never quite reaches the top of the list.
The obvious problem with giving photographs
You do not have their photos. They are on a phone you cannot get at, and asking for them ruins the surprise and hands a job to the person you are trying to give a present to.
That is why we sell it as a voucher. You buy it, they open it at Christmas, and they make the book themselves from their own camera roll whenever they get round to it. They pick the year, they see every photo before anything is printed, and it arrives at their door. It is £39.99 and the voucher does not expire.
There is a wedding version at £99 too, worth knowing about if one of them got married this year and still has not printed a thing.
One thing to check before you buy: it is an iPhone app, so it is worth knowing what phone they carry.