Good Gifts Grow People
I am by no means an excellent gift giver, but I try to view gift giving as an opportunity to meaningfully impact the direction that someone grows in for the next season. This requires a bit more work than buying something off a list because you have to know how someone is interested in growing before you can even start to think about what to get them. Sometimes this isn't as hard as it sounds though. The most meaningful examples that come to mind:
- My sister moved to a city that required a lot of public transportation to get to her job. She had picked up reading to pass the time - a great hobby! For her birthday she asked for a few different books. Instead of a few relatively cheap books, I bought her a Kindle and showed her how to use the Libby app, which had all the books she wanted to read readily available. This was more of an expense to me up front, but she squeezed all of the life out of that thing and ended up buying another one after her first one died.
- My wife is an avid baker. I noticed that she'd been talking about whole wheat more, and had followed some Instagram accounts of people who made bread with flour that they had milled at home. I am not an avid baker, but I am an avid user of the internet. So I did a bunch of research (but not too much!) on what grain mills existed and what was generally recommended. They're pretty expensive, but I figured that buying a high-quality tool would probably serve us longer and deepen her skills more than another book or slightly nicer set of mixing bowls. It's been a few years and the mill still has a permanent spot on our counter because it gets used regularly.
- I am also an avid bike rider, but none of my friends are. Not too long ago, a friend of mine said that he wanted to buy a bike to start commuting to work. Instead of just giving him a few recommendations, I found a free vintage mountain bike that another friend was giving away and spent some time fixing it up for him. The bike turned out great, he loves it for commuting, and I only "charged" him one dinner at our favorite sushi spot.
Not all gifts that I give receive this level of care, and not all of them are winners (in fact, most of them probably aren't). But when you find one and it sticks for more than a few weeks... yeah it feels pretty good.