12.11.2007

Gifted

Print via Fifi Lapin

Print via Strawberry Luna

For me, one of life’s great pleasures is finding the perfect gift (as evidenced by my sizable Design Mom gift guide and the fact that something gifty shows up here at least a few times a week.) That said, after several almost identical conversations with friends who’ve spent the past few weeks weeding through the insane amount of toys that their kids already own, we’re taking a slightly different approach to gift giving for the holidays.

In lieu of swapping gifts between kids, we’ve decided to do joint-family dinners with cookie making and games playing galore. The goal is to simplify things a bit and celebrate our friendships by spending time together rather than adding to the masses of stuff already in our homes.

That takes care of Christmas, but there's also a slew of kid's birthday this month (we have nine little friends with birthdays in December, three of which are baby girls all celebrating their first birthdays within a week of Millie). So there are plenty of opportunities to sufficiently satisfy my jones to buy a good gift.

I always try to do something extra special for December kids -- there's nothing worse than the joint Christmas/birthday gift. I’m especially excited to select 'parent-friendly' presents for the 'first' birthdays, as let's face it, making it through that first year is cause for celebration more for mom and dad than for baby.

I'm leaning toward framing a little piece of art for each of the baby girls and am completely smitten with the combination of whimsical, childlike imagery in Strawberry Luna’s concert posters -- perfect for the hipster babies. While I’ll satisfy the fashionista babies with a Prada-clad Fifi Lapin print.

See...it all comes back around to selecting that perfect gift...

3 comments:

mamacita said...

I don't know that I would consider a joint family dinner to be any "simpler" than buying presents. How easy is it to just go to Target and buy something? But you definitely will win for meaningful and for mindful consumption. That's way more important.

I made an activity advent calendar this year, only to have my son (age 6) say, "Why can't we just have candy?" Yeah, that would have been simpler, but I'm glad I put in the extra effort. And they have been enjoying it, too. (Plus, Lord knows, they haven't been shorted any candy.)

Also: I heart Fifi Lapin so much! What a great gift for a baby girl.

Joslyn said...

Good call mamacita...although my last trip to target was anything but simple ;-) Full disclosure: we're leaning toward ordering pizza or thai for those dinners!

Michelle said...

I love my strawberryluna poster...but it's hiding in my closet right now [I'm working on it]! I think the dinners are a great idea - fun memories with friends are so much better than a silly plastic toy.