I saw one of these fancy Easter baskets by chance, and now am dazzled by the idea that grown-ups can have Easter baskets too, with excellent fancy chocolate instead of the “chocolate-flavored candy” kind.

Godiva Enchanted Easter Basket (photo from Godiva.com), $85 with free shipping if you use code BUNNY.

See’s Deluxe Easter Basket (photo from Sees.com), $59.50 plus shipping, which they call the “Extra Large Family Basket” but I changed the name because I don’t want any lip about how many people ought to be sharing it.
Read the rest of this entry

Easter dresses make me happy to have a daughter. (Easter sweater vests over short-sleeved t-shirts make me happy to have sons.)

Floral Ribbon Dress (photo from TheChildrensPlace.com), sizes 4-14 (similar dress in 6m-4T). The Children’s Place always has nice “coordinated sibling dresses”—although if I had two girls, I think I’d want to use the opportunity to choose TWO of my favorite dresses instead of just one.

Tulle-Layered Dress (photo from OldNavy.com), sizes 6m-5T. I was surprised at how few DRESSY-dresses Old Navy had.
Read the rest of this entry

Many of us are snowed in for the long haul at this point, and the rest of us are sick of hearing people talk about snow, and the sign at the oil company says (with satisfied-cash-register sounds in the background, I’m pretty sure) that there are still 47 days until spring, so let’s have a happy little contest, okay?

My worst Valentine’s Day gift was not SOOOOO awful: it was a single red rose and a red plush teddy bear with an “I LUV U” applique. I’m not even saying these were, objectively-speaking, awful: from another guy, to another girl, they could have been just the ticket, and at least the bear did not luv me “beary much.” They were awful TO ME, from this PARTICULAR boyfriend, because what they communicated to me was, “Your suspicions are correct: I’m shallow and not very bright, and I can’t think of a present that someone else hasn’t arranged in a store display as something I should buy for a particular occasion, and also I have poor taste in stuffed animals, and also I’m being cheap with the single-flower thing but trying to get credit for being Meaningful by calling it a ’single, perfect’ rose, as if it really IS more perfect and special than the ones sold in dozens.”
Read the rest of this entry

Already the requests are coming in: Can you bake for the Valentine’s Day class party? For the Valentine’s Day Family Fair? For the Valentine’s Day fundraising bake sale? For the class parties of your other three school-aged children? For the bake sales of their other two schools?

Why, YES. Yes, I can. I’m not going to make roll-and-cut cookies (I would rather volunteer to be in the fundraising dunk tank, in my bathing suit in front of everyone, YES I REALLY DO HATE MAKING ROLL/CUT COOKIES THAT MUCH), but I can still bake things in heart shapes. (Or, alternately, I can go to the grocery store bakery department and purchase them, then transfer them to baggies so it looks like I made them. But I am not going to get a post out of THAT.)

Wilton heart-shaped cake pan, about $10 (photo from Amazon.com). This is the classic. You can frost the cake in any pastel color, and if you can write with frosting you can write “LUV U” or any conversation-heart message. Or don’t write on it, it’s still pretty. Or frost it white and use red sugar around the edges. If you don’t want to buy a heart-shaped pan, use a round pan and modify the easy bake-sale Christmas tree cake: put it on a red or pink or white paper plate; and instead of a tree, rough out a heart-shape in red sugar. One cake mix makes two bake sale cakes.
Read the rest of this entry

I myself will be sending the kids to school with $2.99 24-packs of valentines bought last year at 90% off. But if you were not there with me, riffling through the stacks trying to find a box of Hello Kitty and a box of shape-shifting stickers among the twenty thousand boxes of whatever TV/movie character wasn’t as popular that year as the manufacturers had expected, perhaps you are instead riffling through the current stacks at their current prices and thinking “Meh.”

And yet—do you really want to sit at the table with the kids and MAKE valentines? How good are you at cutting out a heart shape? How about 24 of them, plus 2 for the teachers? And wait, do you have more than one kid? Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg. Suddenly Valentine’s Day seems like a very nice time to support an artist.

Some of these sets come with envelopes, some with stickers; some are folded, some are flat.  Some of them can even be personalized with your child’s name, though I’d skip that: I love the look of little kids’ signatures.

Mix and Match Valentine Cards by Stitches & Scraps on Etsy (12 for $9.00 plus $2.00 shipping in the U.S.) (photo from the shop). There’s a dinosaur, a bee, a whale, etc., and you can choose how many you want of which ones.  My favorite is the hedgehog, and I don’t see any reason I couldn’t send these to my own friends.
Read the rest of this entry

The biggest gift-giving challenge of my parenting years: buying gifts for Rob, this year when he is 11-almost-12. It took me a month to come up with even the paltry pitiful assortment of possibilities you see below, but a paltry pitiful assortment is better than no assortment at all. (All images are from Amazon.com.)

1. Hexbug Nano. My 11-year-old and 9-year-old boys were so excited about this, they joined forces and saved their money to buy the habitat set, despite me saying desperately, “Wait! Wait! Don’t you want to wait until after Christmas to spend your money?” There’s a battle set I think they would have liked even better if they’d known about it, and if you want to spend more like $75 (the other two sets I mentioned are around $30) there’s the super-awesome 3D Elevation Habitat Set.
Read the rest of this entry

There are times, like when I’m trying to kick a path through the playroom, that I feel like we can’t add even one more toy to this household and in fact would be well-advised to jettison fully half of them. This creates a problem five times a year at birthdays, and a problem-times-five at Christmas. I like to find gifts that are fun enough to be gifts, but that don’t have to live on the toy shelf (or floor, whatever).

1. Character (or otherwise special) bed sheets (both images above from Amazon.com). Bonus: if the child needs sheets anyway, and you spend $20 on Little Mismatched sheets that would have cost $10 if plain/boring, you’re making some of the money work twice: $10 sheets plus $20 gift = $20. (The Wonder Pets set is probably a better example of the kind of sheets a child would actually be happy with, but I got distracted by the ones _I_ would want for ME, and besides the Wonder Pets ones are more expensive so they don’t make my money-working-twice point as impressively.)
Read the rest of this entry

Erin writes:

I was wondering if you would be able to help me. With Christmas fast approaching I’m in a bit of a pickle with figuring out a gift. My parents live near me and their neighbors are an older couple, I’d say in their 70s? Well, the woman (we can call her Gramma Inga as my daughter calls her) LOVES to shop, and has been buying clothes and presents for my daughter and now son for the past 2 years. She doesn’t need an occasion other than Macy-had-a-sale Day. I would love to give her something for Christmas to show her how much I appreciate what she does, because my goodness a very large portion of my daughters adorable dresses and outfits came from her!

However, I am completely stumped… I’ve never purchased anything for anybody that much older than myself other than my parents. She’s German and loves cooking, always bringing food over to my parents house when she’s “made too much” for her husband and herself. I thought of perhaps making something for them both but I’m at a loss as well what to make. You seem so great at choosing gifts for people and your readers are always helpful. You actually helped me with a naming problem with my latest addition. So Swistle, could you and your readers help me please? What do I get Gramma Inga for Christmas? For someone who gives so much during the year I feel like anything I do won’t be enough to really say thank you!

Here is the problem, in my experience, with gift-shopping for a Not-Very-Well-Known Elderly Person:

1. The best would be a gift card, because ONLY THEY will know what they want and have room for.
2. In general, they dislike the idea of gift cards and find them impersonal and thought-free.
Read the rest of this entry

It seems from the title as if this will be a list of bad gifts, like “Give ‘em a fruitcake, that’ll show ‘em!!” or “How ’bout a DEAD FROG IN A BOX??” But no: this is a list that acknowledges that sometimes we have people we don’t like (*COUGH*in-laws*COUGH*), and that sometimes we have to buy presents for those people anyway, and that sometimes those presents must be something perfectly nice and NOT a dead frog in a box. And we don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time thinking about what the person would LIKE to receive, we just want to buy A Perfectly Nice Gift and get it over with.

These will, of course, also be Perfectly Nice Gifts for people you DO like. But what I’m aiming for is emotion-neutral gifts that convey neither the false impression of love NOR the accurate impression of dislike. And also, because the longer you spend on such a task the more you’ll resent it, I’m aiming for gifts that will be widely well-received, so that you can pick one and not have to give it a lot of thought.
Read the rest of this entry

Last week we talked about gift ideas for people having financial problems.  This week we’ll talk about another trouble-spot:  gift ideas for people who don’t want anything.

This is not the same as the problem of people who already have everything—also known as the “she has Waterford crystal for 24, what’s left to buy?” problem.  Instead this is the problem of buying for someone who wishes the holidays weren’t so commercial and says, if asked for gift ideas, “I don’t know—I don’t need anything, and I already have so much STUFF.”
Read the rest of this entry