After I wrote that post about wanting to get started on my Christmas shopping early this year, Chris and I had a little talk about what we’re going to do for Christmas this year – present wise, I mean.
Over the last few years our families on both sides have pretty much agreed not to exchange presents between the adults. Why? Well, everyone has children (except us) and we’re all established in our homes. We don’t really need presents. Oh they’re nice, but when you already have most everything you need or want you don’t really need to get Christmas presents.
So for the last few years we’ve all just been getting presents, for the most part, for the kids in the family. That’s still a lot of gifts to get! Between Chris and I we have 17 nephews and nieces, plus two on my side have kids of their own so add three more to the list (oh and add our two god-children as well!) If we were also buying for each of the adults individually we could add another 20 gifts to the Christmas list that we’d need to buy! So I guess we cut it in half … but it’s still a lot of gifts to buy.
Most of our nephews and nieces are in their teens and I find teens the hardest to buy for each year. Most of them don’t really need anything in particular. I mean they all have iPods, game players, closets full of clothes … so what do you get for a teen that already has everything?
As I said earlier I’m keeping my open for anything that’s on sale that might make a good gift. I think for at least half of the kids I’m leaning towards getting newly released DVD’s, music CD’s, and perhaps some popular games. I just need to find out what they already have (what games and game players, dvds and music) and what others are planning on getting them so they don’t end up getting two or more of something.
I spent some time this evening looking at the DVD section at Buy.com. There are a lot of great movies that have just been released on DVD and there’s a section there where you can pre-order DVDs that will soon be released like The Dark Knight , Mama Mia, Indiana Jones the Kingdom Crystal Skull, Step Brothers and many other movies. I figure that if I order some movies that are only being released at the end of November or in early December there’ll be little chance that the kids I get them for will already have these movies.
Of course, for some of the kids I might just buy them gift certificates. I’m fairly sure some of the teenage girls might like a gift certificate for one of their favorite clothing stores.
So do you have teens on your shopping list? If so, what kinds of things are you thinking of getting them?
I think age plays into it quite a bit. There is a big difference between a 13 year old and a 19 year old. An idea of your price range would also help us in making suggestions. That said, here are some of my preliminary thoughts:
– Cash, it’s hard to argue with green
– If you’re going to go the gift card route, make sure it’s something they would actually use, not just something you assume they will use do to it’s demographic appropriateness, or because their mom said so
– I have recently become a big fan of iTunes gift cards. I received one a couple of years ago but didn’t have an ipod until recently. They’re useful on everything from books to movies and music, AND if you don’t mind not having a physical card to give them, there are a plethora of ebay sellers who will email you the code at almost a 50% savings.
Obviously it would help to know the kid, but I can’t tell you how many gift cards I have received over the years that were left to expire because I just don’t shop at Store X…
Jeremy
I stumble upon your post while browsing the right Christmas presents for kids
It’s been one year since this post . Christmas 2009 is only few days away , I am now also still wondering that to give to my kids just like you were one year ago 🙂
I think age plays into it quite a bit.