Gift-Giving
[ 1 September 2007 ]
It can be hard to buy someone a present, especially if they are the type of person who already has everything they need. Your best bet is to get them something that makes them feel good, rather than something practical or with a definite use. I think the easiest way of achieving this is to ask your friends some questions. Sneakily! NOT the week before their birthday! Try asking them things like…
What are your favourite colours?
What scents do you like? (Vanilla, musk, rose, jasmine, chocolate, etc.)
Do you prefer tea or coffee?
Who do you secretly want to look like?
Do you have a favourite era or time period?
What do you like to do when you’re alone?
What do you wish you were really good at?
Gift ideas (to jog the imagination):
Buy them a notebook, some good pens, stickers, personalised stationery, bracelets, stripey socks, silk scarves, a copy of your favourite book, a mix CD, lip balm, a makeup voucher, fancy candles, a pretty teacup & saucer, a bird’s nest, vitamins, a string of fairy lights, helium balloons, vintage postcards, a stack of magazines, a pirate eyepatch, an engraved hipflask, a bottle of champagne, bubble mixture, a collection of old clocks, a typewriter, slippers of animal feet, a huge block of chocolate, a foot-spa, nailpolish, rollerskates, an umbrella, records, a dictaphone, an adult education course, zines, crystals, cute underpants, a makeover, a framed print, a button (or badge) making machine, or a nameplate necklace…
Give them a photograph of the two of you framed, a Polaroid camera & some film, dollhouse miniatures of things they wish they owned, vintage sunglasses, a bowtie, an orchid, anything you no longer use & have upgraded (laptop, camera, mp3 player, cellphone, etc.), a box of macarons, a plate of cupcakes, a wonderful chocolate cake with a huge candle on the top, ballet lessons, Jem dolls or other childhood relics, a quilt, a wig, or perfume…
Hire — on their behalf — the services of a stylist, a hairdresser, a masseuse, a makeup artist, an interior decorator, a manicurist, a beauty therapist, a personal trainer or a psychic…
Organise a surprise party, a picnic, a tea-party, a museum outing, an aquarium visit, a treasure hunt, a photoshoot, or an amusement park visit…
What’s the best present you’ve ever received?
Hyper-love & bunny kisses,
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Best present I ever received was a trip to Brazil :)
One of the loveliest presents I ever received was a hand-made zine by my then girlfriend…it was sewn together with thread and handwritten, with a little paper heart on a string as a bookmark. I still cry when I read it, because it was so heartfelt and genuine.
I think the best gifts are the ones that have a lot of thought put into them. Things that are personal are always the most meanigful.
one time my friends threw me a surprise birthday party by sneaking up behind me in my bedroom, throwing a pillowcase over my head, carrying me bodily out to a van, and driving me to a restaurant where they whipped the pillowcase off and screamed SURPRISE!
it was way more awesome then it might sound.
these are glorious ideas!!!
i think one of the best gifts i’ve ever recieved was the gift my boy got me for my birthday last year, it was a necklace. a tiny heart pendant with a blue sapphire in the middle. and a love letter he put in the box under the necklace. i keep the letter in my wallet so i can read it whenever i like. (i pretty much know it by heart now.)
=]
this year he got me a nintendo ds lite and pokemon pearl. (man i’m a nerd.)
The best present that I ever received was from…myself. :p
I bought my best friend and I a sleep-over at Taronga Zoo, and it was darn awesome.
One of the best gifts I ever received was from a close friend of mine. The birthday gift was a month late, but it was JUST in time for a cruise I was going on later in the week.
My friend knew I would be completely unprepared for the trip, so as my gift she bought me a pretty storage box from a home decor store and filled it to the brim with all kinds of travel-sized toiletries! It was fantastic and exactly what I needed at the time! I think I was the most prepared person on the ship!
For my 18th birthday my beautiful friend (whom I’ve known since I was born) made me go on a treasure hunt around our street. She had hidden lots of little things and included notes that reminded me of the two of us growing up together. So sweet.
For the same birthday my parents bought me a plane ticket to London as I am going on a Contiki tour in January.
Beautiful, beautiful people :)
best gift ever was from my grandma, she gave me a circular frilly lace canopy to hang above my bed. I pushed my bed to the other end of the room and used the canopy to create a meditation/reading space. :D
My boyfriend took me on a four-day motorcycle trip through the Rocky Mountains. It was so beautiful, sunny and green…
lately i have been buying tickets to things i think people would like.
i know my dad would love to go to the supercars when they come to new zealand next year, but hes the type not to get himself something like that. so i got him a ticket and pit pass for fathers day.
this sounds stupid but my friend forgot to buy my 18th birthday present until the night of my party. I actually caught him buying it too! lol anyway he bought my one of thess
not made for actually usesnorkel pipes and mask. You know the kiddie ones. unlike most peoples presents it was completely spontanious, a bit weird and fun. most other ppl just gave me money. (Nothing says i love you like a wad of cash. not.) Long story short my Snorkel was used as a beer bong in the bar my party was at.I think the funniest was when my sister and I were younger. Mum took us outside for Christmas (for the first part of the present) and showed us a bunch of hay in the back of the car. I thought FINALLY! I’m getting a pony…Sadly I wound up with a guinea pig.
When I was first learning to use a real grown-up camera, and learning about photography, I used about 10 rolls of film, and stored them in my fridge. I couldn’t be bothered getting them developed, because I felt like I was just crap at photography.
For my birthday that year, my friend gave me a photo album, filled with all these beautiful photographs, and after a moment or two, I realized they all looked familiar, because I had taken them! My friend had been sneaking the rolls of film out of my fridge, one by one, and replacing them with empty cannisters, over the space of about a month, and getting them developed. He had the best shots enlarged, and mounted in the photo album.
That was my best present ever, and it gave me the confidence to carry on learning about photography too. :)
My boyfriend’s sister knit a beautiful striped scarf for me. It is so chic but better ‘cause it’s one-of-a-kind!
My best birthday present was a surpise party that one of my best friends organized. It was perfect, I got a lap dance and a beautiful chocolate cake n_n. Not to mention lots of cute letters from my other friends and a bag of coffee.
I’ve never really gotten a great, memorable gift. I always got things that I had asked for or needed for my birthday. I think one of the cooler things was an e-card my friend made me with a bunch of silly inside jokes. The rest of the time I get money. Or nothing at all from my friends.
I agree with the entire first list of suggestions. I would love to receive a cup & saucer with a bird’s nest full of vitamins inside!
Don’t forget the presentation, though. Wrapping something beautifully is as impresssive as finding the perfect gift.
For one of my friends, I bought ten vintage postcards, writing something I liked about them on each one, bought the stamps, and dropped one a day into the mailbox, so she got mail every day for ten days. Everyone likes getting mail.
I love both funcional and pretty gifts; the best funcional one was a Wacom (LOVE LOVE LOVE) by bf gave to me this year, though the electric guitar I got from my parents as a teen was awesome too :P (now it stands alone in my closet :
Gala, I LOVE your site so much! Thanks for all the inspiration :-)
My best friend of all times with whom i share a little obsession with the glamourous & decadent 1920s gave me the loveliest present ever.
One evening he said, dress 20s style super fabulous, i’ll pick you up for dinner, which he did. He was dressed in a tuxedo and wore a flower on his lapel and told me to keep my eyes shut while we were driving in his car. We drove and drove, then stopped.
I had to promise not to look since he said he had to prepare some things. I was finally allowed to open my eyes, and this is what I saw: He had taken me to the top level of the 6 story parking lot in the city. There, he had set a table (with linen, silverware, cristal glasses,champagne and something to snack on), two chairs, a lantern, and a vintage grammophone playing billie holiday. we danced under the dark nightly skies. suddenly two security guys appeared. they did not know what to say or do – so they just smiled and let us be.
this whole evening, the preparations, the picnic, the music – it was the most wonderful present i ever received.
Hmm….probably a present for made for me by my then girlfriend and now best friend. She knitted me a black beenie with pointy cat ears poking up. Very cute. Also, the t-shirt she had painted with the slogan “Too pretty for prison” and a picture of a pretty girl with weapons… I loved both of those.
Faabulous timing, Gala!
And Stella Mayfair, that is a wonderful story!
The string of pearls my grandmother gave me around my sixteenth birthday. Every year for my birthday she would show me one pearl and say, when you’re sixteen I’m going to get these made into a necklace. And then she did! When she died, I wore it to her funeral and cried and cried. She was an amazing woman.
Or the necklace my parents got me for another birthday. Apparently I treasure necklaces? :)
OR, haha, one of my best friends made a beautiful set of cards for my seventeenth birthday. We hadn’t even known each other very long but they were beautiful and I keep them close. I love cards when they are handmade, even more than the gifts :)
rollerskates for my 19th. you never get too old for rollerskates and i had been wanting them since I was like 4!
Is there anywhere you know of in Melbourne (or online, available to Australia) that I can get a nameplate necklace?
Thanks for the compliment, Eternity :-)
it’s not really a present, ( though it did come in a box! ) but my best friend made me a calendar full of letters, challenges, gifts & even a selfmade puzzle for me to comfort myself with while she’s in america for a year! i absolutely love her for it, because it really brightnes me up when i miss her the most.
I think my birthday present from my bf last year has been my best one – he took me to pet the cheetahs at Auckland Zoo. Because of the popularity, I had to wait for nearly 3 months after my birthday, with a few clues but no confirmation. It was well worth it though. Osiris and Anubis are lovely, you can hear them purring (yes, they actually purr) from 4 metres away in a noisy zoo, and they love Vegemite (they like it better than Marmite, apparently – so not quite fully integrated Kiwis) – and they just sit there and let you pat them.
My first Christmas away from home, my friends all got together and made me hand-made cards with glitter and construction paper and sparkles and water colors and stickers and mailed them to me across the ocean. I got so many beautiful cards! It was great. I sat on my bed at midnight on Christmas all alone and opened them up one by one, and thought about my friends all together, drinking wine and all thinking about me enough to put them together.
I would like purring baby cheetahs, too, though.
It was not a birthday – just a beautiful letter and song written about me by my most favourite person in the entire world!
=)Those were the best gifts ever!
My boyfriend always says the best presents are the ones you never even realised you wanted. And it’s SO true!
I think the best present I ever received was when my boyfriend surprised me by taking me out to tea in a tea house out in the countryside on my 21st birthday! The other things good about the day were when his family bought me presents even though I wasn’t expecting anything. :)
hey!
found this post and i love it!
i think there are two gifts that i will remember for a while. for my 16th birthday, which was last summer, 2 of my best friends gave me twister. about a week before my birthday i was curious about what the gift is and all they said was “oh, with it you’re going to knock down all the boys. and girls”.
the other one was from 2 boys who are quite ribald (but still cute) and so they gave me 2 blue rubber ducks (i named the ducks after them), few books from 1960s about menses and other stuff related and a make-up kit made for kids…
my most favourite gift ever was a beautiful sparkly glass pumpkin.
it’s kind of an inside joke between me and my friends, and just glancing at it makes me giggle/thankGodfortheutterlylovelymemoriesitevokes. it’s true: the thought counts.