Ben's Holiday Gift Guide
Or: combatting the epidemic of stuff
To all of the well-meaning parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, godparents and neighbors out there, I have a message for you: your children and grandchildren, your nieces and nephews, and those adorable neighborhood kids for whom you like to do just a little something special — they have too much stuff.
It’s everywhere: the plastic, the colorful, the stimulating, the breakable, and the cheap. The clutter of stuff fills every corner of a house, gobbling up space, leading to stress and fatigue, and creating a dull level of joy-squelching consternation that lasts well beyond the 12 Days of Christmas.
The day after Christmas itself has become treacherous, with parents and children alike tiptoeing through the wasteland of half-played-with toys, crashing from sugar highs, and slogging through the malaise that is induced by an overabundance of stuff.
There is a psychological term for this: Choice Overload, or the Paradox of Choice. Psychologists have determined that people, especially children, can become overwhelmed when presented with too many options, making it difficult to make a decision or find joy out of an activity once a decision upon it has been made.
“How silly,” you might say. “Too many gifts! Alas the child who is so beloved by those around them that getting too many gifts is a problem. There are kids around the world who get nothing!”
Think of the children, yes. But in doing so, resist the rush of short-term dopamine that comes from a bright box filled with something that could be soon forgotten, broken, or lost. Play the long-game instead.
With all that in mind, I present my 2024 Holiday Gift Guide with ideas and experiences you can shower your loved ones with that will not clutter the house or stress out the parents of the little ones.
Gift Idea #1: Make Something Together. Buy the ingredients to make bread and spend a weekend afternoon getting messy with flour. Teach them how to do it. Or, if you’re not a good baker, lean into the experience of learning it together. This would also work for pizza or cookies or ice cream or home-made pasta or anything else the child in your life would be interested in making. Actually, teaching them to slow down and sharing the lesson that sometimes good things take time and effort is a gift in itself. (Hint: for those in their 20s, 30s, and beyond, this also makes a great at-home date night with your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/partner).
Recommendation: Breaking Bread with Kids book and a bag of local grains from Maine Grains in Skowhegan, Maine. Cost: $22 for the book; grains and flour vary by price.
Gift Idea #2: An Annual Membership to a Museum. Full disclosure, this may depend on whether you live in an area with a museum or whether you can at least travel to one, but otherwise this is a gift that keeps on giving throughout the year. You can take your kids or grandkids yourself if you live nearby, or their parents can take them and they won’t have to pay the regular admission fee. This gift idea would also work if you a YMCA or local pool near you with punch passes or youth or family memberships.
Recommendation (local to Maine): a reciprocal membership to the Maine Discovery Museum, which allows unlimited visits plus free entry to 350 other museums and venues in the same network, and 50% off admission to 200 others! Cost $275. Some restrictions may apply.
Gift Idea #3: Tickets to a Show. Take your children or grandchildren to a movie, theater show, concert, or other performance. Or buy them a gift certificate and let them pick the show. If you really want to spoil them, take them out for dinner and ice cream before or after the show. Make it a whole night and give them an experience rather than a material possession. What you will really be giving them is a memory. Even if you think something like a stage show or symphony performance might be beyond them, kids will remember the feeling of being there with you forever. Get dressed up and make it a night!
Recommendation: your local movie theater will sell gift certificates or check out your community theatre. Here in Maine, you can’t go wrong with Penobscot Theatre, the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, or Center Theatre in Dover-Foxcroft. Waterfront Concerts and the Cross Insurance Center frequently have kid-friendly shows as does the Collins Center and the Gracie.
Gift Idea #4: Every-Parent-With-Every-Child-Combination Special Days. I give my parents credit for this one. Every summer when my sister and I were younger, we would each have one day with each parent just to ourselves and it would be up to us what we wanted to do. It would usually be something simple, like ice cream and mini-golf or a trip to the beach. One time, I remember going on a glider ride in Bar Harbor with my dad. Kids crave 1:1 attention from their parents, and whether you have one child or seven, those kids need relationships with each parent separate from their siblings. As a quick aside, when my now-ten year old turned six, my wife and I took just him to a Charlie Brown Jazz Christmas Show on his birthday (which is in December), and it remains one of my favorite nights of parenting we’ve ever had.
Recommendation: put some dates on the dates on the calendar and ask your kids or grandkids what they most want to do. You might be surprised at what they come up with! Don’t forget to follow through and actually do it, and then remind them this was their Christmas present (or birthday present, or whatever).
Gift Idea #5: A Trip to a Book Store. Much like tickets to a show or letting them pick out activities for a special day, a trip to a book store might surprise you as to what kids are interested in. Book stores are wonderful, magical places that a lot of kids are not even aware of because so much of purchasing is done online these days. Our communities need book stores to thrive, and it is healthy for kids to browse overpacked shelves and see all the options that are out there (despite what I said above about Paradox of Choice). And yes, sometimes book stores have toys too if you need to give in and get them something like that. Another hint: this also works for antique shops. My own kids are surprisingly enthralled looking through old stuff (often including books) at our local antique shops.
Recommendation: $25 goes a long way in most local book stores. Give the kids a price limit and let them run wild through the shelves. Also let them check out an antique shop sometime, and let them lead their meandering way through the store.
Gift Idea #6: a Magazine Subscription. Print media is not dead, and, in fact, a return to the printed page would be good for a lot of kids and their developing brains. This gift has the added bonus of being delivered throughout the year, so it is another gift that keeps on giving. You could pick one out for them, or print a list of options and let them choose.
Recommendation: Sports Illustrated for Kids, National Geographic for Kids, Lego Magazine (hint: this one is actually free), and Highlights Magazine have all been hits in our household. Plenty of other options exist. Prices range from $20-$45+/year. Another hint: magazine subscriptions are good gifts for adults, too. Every month when my Outside Magazine comes in the mail, it gives me 2-3 hours of great escapism through reading.
Gift Idea #7: Save into their College Accounts. This is probably the least exciting of the ideas, but it could arguably pay the largest dividends over time. Kids might not realize or appreciate how much long-term saving or investing will help them over time, but you can bet when they go off to college and they are reminded of all the savings their parents or grandparents did for them when they were younger, they will appreciate it then. My grandfather used to give us each a $100 saving bond for Christmas. I didn’t understand why the $100 bill looked different than a regular $100 bill (not that I saw many of those as a kid) and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t spend it, but I appreciated those savings bonds all the more as I grew up. Hint: this idea doubles as a gift to the parents of the child you’re saving for.
Recommendation: make sure your child or grandchild has a 529 college savings account set up. You can set one up for them even as a grandparent. The earnings will grow tax-free if used for education. Save into it annually or through a recurring payment plan (i.e. $5 or $10/month+). In some states like here in Maine, there is a 30% match on contributions up to $900, and $100 free into the account for setting up automatic payments. You could also do savings bonds, but 529 savings are likely to grow faster.
Bonus Gift Idea #8: A Parents Night Out. The lens of a lot of what I’ve written about above is towards advising grandparents and aunts and uncles and other older family members who are buying gifts for young ones. But for your adult children with children of their own, the best thing you can get them is a night out. Spouses need time together without their kids. Whether that is for a couple hours or an overnight or two, giving your adult children time for their own date nights is worth its weight in gold.
Recommendation: combine any of the ideas above for the kids like tickets to a show, going to a museum, and baking bread and cookies with getting those kids out of their parents’ hair for a few hours or maybe an overnight.
I think most people are noble gift-givers. The feeling of warmth one gets from giving a gift, to many, is greater in magnitude than the joy of receiving something in return. This altruistic spirit should be commended.
But love is not measured in price tags, and it is not counted in ribbons and bows. Most of the gift ideas above are about experiences rather than material possessions. The feeling of doing something together and, in some cases, the skills that are developed (e.g.. baking bread) or the interests that are sparked (e.g. seeing a show at the local theatre) will last a lifetime and may even positive impact the trajectory of a child’s life.
That said, it is still okay to get them “stuff.” Just remember that your own gifts are being given in the context of other family members also giving gifts, so what might seem like a small incremental addition to the pantheon of gifts starts to add up when everyone giving them has similar thoughts. The volume of gifts can get out of hand and lead to real exhaustion and fatigue (yes, I know this is a so-called first-world problem). Less is often more.
Think simple and creative and, yes, traditional. A lot of what looks cool on the shelves is actually made specifically to look that way, but is underwhelming and easily broken once it hits the living room floor. For most kids under the age of five, they are happier with the box itself. Our own kids when they were that young were always content just to play with the balloons on their birthdays (there is a whole generation of kids who now simply call this “Keepy Uppy,” which they learned from Bluey, possibly the best show on TV for kids under the age of ten (and a lot of adults too).
And every once in awhile it is still okay to get kids a giant box with actual presents in it. It’s still fun to open presents. Kids deserve a chance to rip open boxes on Christmas morning or Hanukkah or their birthdays. Although in the end, you may be surprised that it is actually the box itself that bring the greatest joy.
Ben Sprague lives and works in Bangor, Maine as a Senior V.P./Commercial Lending Officer for Damariscotta-based First National Bank. He previously worked as an investment advisor and graduated from Harvard University in 2006. Ben can be reached at ben.sprague@thefirst.com or bsprague1@gmail.com.
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Addendum - The Data
This wouldn’t be a Sunday Morning Post without a look at the data. It often seems like materialism has won the War on Christmas. That it at least in part due to how historically inexpensive toys have become. Yes, it’s true. Toys are one of the most deflating consumer goods out there. The chart below shows the price of toys, benchmarked to 1982 prices, over the last 40+ years.
Sorry, parents of kids born in the 1980s and early 1990s: you had it the worst. Prices today for toys are almost 80% lower than they were in the mid-1990s! Why is that? In short, globalization. Imports are much cheaper today than they were before, supply chains are more robust and efficient, materials have become more ubiquitous and less expensive, and foreign toy manufacturers are able to pay much less for labor (and ignore environmental regulations) as compared to their American counterparts.
So yes, I can hear people saying as they read that not every child will get a toy for Christmas this year and a lot of families are struggling. Of course. But the data doesn’t lie. The average toy shelf at Walmart, Target, the digital “shelf” on Amazon, or the overflowing shelves at your local box store/toy store have more plastic abundance in them and at a much lower cost than even the most fruitful toy department of your average 1990s toy store. And the ability for Americans to buy more for less today is among the reasons why the clutter of too much stuff has become so problematic.
Again, less is more, and go for experiences and long-term life lessons with compounding benefits rather than the flashy more material things on the store shelf.
Merry Early Christmas and Happy Holidays from my wife and I to you. (Over-sugared kids not pictured).
