The group chat is called “Christmas” and it has been called Christmas since 2019, because renaming it every year felt like admitting something.
It wakes up in early November. Somebody — usually my sister — posts “so what are we doing for mum and dad”, and then eleven days pass.
Six adequate presents
The old system, if you can call it a system, was that each of us bought each of them something. Three children, two parents, six presents, and each present had to be individually good, because a bad present from one child in a row of six is extremely visible.
So the standard was high and the budget, per present, was about twenty-five pounds. Which is the exact price band in which nothing meaningful exists. Twenty-five pounds buys you a nicer version of something they own, and six of those arrive at once, on the same morning, and go into the drawer I wrote about in September.
I bought my dad a jumper four years running. Four. I did not realise this until my sister mentioned it, gently, in the chat, and then I checked, and it is true, and two of them were similar colours.
One present, one owner
Last year we did one present between the three of us, and the change that made it work was not the pooling. It was that one person bought it.
The year before we’d agreed on a joint present in principle, on about the 12th of November, and then absolutely nothing happened for a fortnight, because a decision that belongs to a group chat belongs to nobody. Three people each waiting for one of the other two to be the one who actually orders it. On the 19th my brother bought them a hamper, out of pure panic, and it was fine, and it was a hamper.
Now: one person owns it, buys it, and everybody transfers them money within the week. The whole thing took four days.
What we bought
We gave them LifePages, which is a memoir service — my mum doesn’t write anything, the questions come to her, and at the end of it there’s a proper written book of her life.
I’ve written about how that went in a separate note, and about the business of everybody chipping in, and I won’t do either twice. The relevant part for Christmas is the money: it is well past what any one of us would spend on a parent, and it is comfortably inside what three of us spend on two parents in a normal year. That’s the whole argument. We were already spending it. We were spending it in twenty-five pound pieces, on jumpers.
The card
Here is the bit we agonised over and should not have.
Because it isn’t a thing in a box, what my parents actually opened on Christmas morning was a card, from the three of us, explaining what we’d done and that it would start in the new year.
I was genuinely worried about this. There is something in me that thinks a present should have weight and paper and a moment. My brother said, more than once, that it would look cheap.
She read it out to the room. Then she read it again to my aunt on the phone that afternoon. Then, at about four o’clock, she asked whether she was allowed to start thinking about what she’d say, which was not a question any of us had anticipated and which we all found difficult to answer without getting a bit peculiar about it.
Nobody has minded. Nobody has ever minded. I think the fear of the flat envelope is entirely a thing we do to ourselves.
Timing, which is the actual advice
Order anything that has to be made or written by the middle of November.
The year before last we ordered something personalised on the 3rd of December and it arrived on the 6th of January, which was fine, but by then Christmas had been over for a fortnight and it landed like a delivery rather than a present.
And with anything that requires the recipient to do something — an interview, a set of questions, a course — allow more time than that. My mum did not really begin until the third week of January, and that is normal, and it is why we now decide in October and buy in early November.
This year
We’ve already decided, which is the first time that sentence has ever been true in this family.
My dad is getting one too. And I have bought him a jumper as well, as a joke, in a colour he already owns.
Things people email to ask
- What do you buy parents who have everything for Christmas?
- Stop trying to buy something and start trying to buy one thing. The reason parents end up with cupboards of unused presents is that four adult children each buy something modest and thoughtful, and the aggregate is eight objects nobody needed. One present, funded between everybody, clears a budget that actually reaches something worth having.
- Should siblings buy one joint Christmas present?
- It has worked much better for us, with one condition: somebody has to own it. The first year we agreed on a joint present in principle and then had a fortnight of nobody ordering anything, because a decision made by a group chat belongs to nobody. Now one person buys it and everybody pays them, and it takes four days instead of five weeks.
- Is it acceptable to give a card on the day and the present later?
- Yes, and in our family it has never once been a problem. We were worried it would look like a cop-out — a bit of card instead of a thing to unwrap — and what actually happened is that my mum read it out to the room and then talked about it for the rest of the afternoon. Anything personalised or made to order is going to run past Christmas anyway.
- When should you order a personalised Christmas present?
- By the middle of November for anything that has to be made, written or printed, and earlier if it involves the recipient doing something. We ordered a memoir service in the first week of December one year and the useful part — the questions arriving, my mum starting to answer them — did not begin until well into January, which was fine but was not what anybody pictured on the day.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The year we all put in, and how badly I handled it
Pooling for one present is obviously sensible and everybody says so. Nobody mentions that it means three siblings and their partners having an explicit conversation about money, which our family had successfully avoided for about twenty years.
Presents for people who say they don’t want presents
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
Presents for people who live two hours away
We see my parents perhaps eight times a year, and for a long time our presents were an attempt to make up the difference — bigger, posted, apologetic. The thing that helped was giving something that produced phone calls instead of parcels.
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