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.
My mum has been saying “don’t get me anything” since roughly 2011.
For about ten years I heard that as a formality — the thing people say — and bought her a nice version of something she already owned. A better kettle. A nicer scarf than the scarf. Hand cream that cost eleven pounds instead of four.
She thanked me properly every single time, because she is a person who does that, and last summer I was looking for a spare pillowcase in her spare room and opened a drawer.
The drawer
Four candles. Three sets of toiletries, one of them from me, in 2019, still sealed.
I stood there for a while feeling like somebody who had been given a report card. Nothing in that drawer was thoughtless — every item had been chosen by somebody who loves her — and collectively it was about eleven years of us not listening.
She meant it. That’s the thing I want to write down plainly, because I think a lot of people my age don’t believe it. She has a house she has lived in for thirty-one years, every cupboard is full, and the arrival of another object is not a happy event, it is a small storage problem with an emotional obligation attached.
The experience-day trap
So the next year I did what everybody says to do and bought an experience instead. Afternoon tea, somewhere nice, for her and her friend Pat.
It sat on the mantelpiece for eleven months and expired.
I was annoyed about this for a while and then I thought about what I had actually given her, which was a task. Somebody had to ring up. Somebody had to pick a date that worked for two women in their seventies, one of whom was having a bad year with her hip. Somebody had to drive there. An experience voucher is homework with a deadline, and the fact that the homework is pleasant does not stop it being homework.
She felt guilty about the expiry. I felt guilty about her feeling guilty. Eleven pounds worth of afternoon tea generated, conservatively, forty pounds of guilt.
The photo book, which was nearly right
Two Christmases ago I made her a photo book. Properly — good paper, captions, the lot. It took me two evenings and I was pleased with it.
She loved it. And about a month later I realised what I’d done, which is that I had made her a book about my children and given it to her as a present about herself.
That’s not nothing. Grandparents want pictures of the grandchildren. But it was still, fundamentally, us giving her more of us, on a shelf, and I had spent two evenings not asking her a single question.
What finally worked
We gave her LifePages for her birthday in March.
It’s a memoir service — the short version is that she doesn’t have to write anything, the questions come to her, and what comes out at the end is an actual written book of her life. Which is precisely the shape of thing that had been missing from every present in that drawer: it doesn’t give her an object, it asks her for something.
Her first reaction was exactly what you’d expect. “Who on earth would want to read about me.” She said it twice, in the same phone call, in a slightly different tone the second time.
That lasted about three weeks.
What I hadn’t anticipated is how much of it is not about the book. She rings me now to check things — which, two hours forty away, turns out to be most of the point — was it 1968 or 1969, what was the name of the road — and those calls are ten minutes long and are, I think, the actual present. There is a version of this that ends with a book on a shelf and I would take it. But the thing we have had all year is my mother, twice a month, telling me about a job she had in a shoe shop that I did not know existed.
The honest bits
It has taken months, and it was always going to. This is not a present you hand over finished; it’s a present that starts on the day you give it.
My dad got one too, for his eightieth, and it went differently. Tom’s dad got one at the same time and has not started. Six months. He says he will. I think, for him, the framing landed wrong — we gave it to him at a family thing, in front of people, and being handed your own life story in a room full of relatives is a lot to be handed.
And there was a stretch in about June where my mum went quiet on it, and I had to work out whether to chase her or leave it. I left it. She came back to it in July on her own, and I still don’t know whether that was the right call or whether I got lucky.
What I’d say to anyone
Ask them what they’d like a record of. Not what they’d like.
It’s a completely different question and it has never once produced the answer “a kettle”.
Things people email to ask
- What do you get grandparents who say they don’t want anything?
- Something that isn’t an object and doesn’t require them to go anywhere. In our experience the refusal is usually genuine and specific — they have a house full of things and no more shelves — but it is not a refusal of attention. Gifts that ask them for something, rather than giving them something, have landed far better here than any purchase.
- Are experience days a good present for older parents?
- They were not for mine, and I would think hard before buying another. An experience voucher is a task with an expiry date on it: somebody has to book it, travel to it, and be well on the day. My mum kept the afternoon tea voucher on the mantelpiece for eleven months out of politeness and then it expired, and we were both embarrassed about it.
- What is a good non-material gift for someone who has everything?
- Something that produces a record of them rather than an addition to their house. We used a memoir service, which is essentially somebody else doing the work of turning a person’s life into a written book, and it worked because it asked my mum for something instead of adding to the drawer. Recordings, letters and interviews do a version of the same thing for nothing.
- How do you give someone a memoir without it feeling morbid?
- Give it as interest rather than as an ending, and give it well before anybody is ill. My mum’s first reaction was “who on earth would want to read about me”, which is the reaction most people have, and it faded within about three weeks of starting. Framing matters: this is not for posterity, it is because I do not actually know how she met my dad.
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
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.
What we gave my dad for his eightieth
He didn’t want a party, he didn’t want a fuss, and he had specifically said, out loud, in front of witnesses, that he didn’t want anything. So we gave him something that required him to talk about himself for six months, which on paper was a catastrophic misreading.
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.
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