Personalised Christmas Gifts, and the Deadline Nobody Mentions

Personalised Christmas gifts fail for two reasons: the personalisation is a name printed on something generic, or the order was placed on the twentieth and arrived in January.

The test for personalisation

If the gift would still make sense given to someone else, it is not personalised. A mug with a name is a mug. A photograph of a specific afternoon is not.

The deadline nobody mentions

Made-to-order items are not last-minute purchases, and gift guides never say so. You need production time plus delivery time, and December delivery networks are slower than the rest of the year.

Ours are made to order in the UK in 72 hours, then shipped: about 2–4 working days within the UK, longer to Europe and the US. In practice: order by mid-December, not the week before. Anything crossing a border, order a week earlier again.

Worth it

• A photograph that only exists on a phone. The most under-rated gift there is. Somebody in every family has 8,000 pictures and has printed none of them.
• A calendar of your own photographs.
• A family recipe book, typed up, original spelling mistakes intact.
• A puzzle of somewhere that matters — the house, the view, the dog. Upload the photo and pick a piece count: 110 for an afternoon, 500 for the days between Christmas and New Year when nobody knows what day it is.

Not worth it

• Anything you are learning to make for the occasion. December is not the month to start.
• Homemade cosmetics. People are afraid to use them.
• A frame containing a photograph the recipient did not choose and now has to display.
• Anything with a year printed on it that will look dated by March.

One good idea for a family

A single photograph, made into four different puzzles at four different piece counts — 30 for the youngest, 1,000 for whoever claims to be good at these. Same image, four experiences, one afternoon where everybody is doing the same thing in different rooms.