This post brought to you by Groupon Gift Shop. The content and opinions expressed below are that of Mother’s Niche.
Is it just me, or does the thought of bringing new toys and gadgets into the home feel a little….too much?
I hate that regretful feeling you get when you spend money on gifts for your children, only to see that item collect dust far too soon in the future.
This year we decided to do things differently.
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We will get our kids a toy that we KNOW they will play with, but anything else we give as a gift will be a memory we can enjoy as a family, or individually with our kids. This could be a date night with mom or dad, or something we all do together.
I got on Groupon to look for some gift ideas, and I kind of went crazy. There were so many fun options! Because of the amount of gifts I was able to come up with, I’ve decided to break the ideas up into a 3-part series. I will post several more ideas throughout the next week, so be sure to come back and check them out.
“Frozen”
Here is an idea I came up with for my 2 girls. They LOVE Frozen, and Groupon had a deal for sledding, so I bought a voucher for snow tubing and packaged the gift like this:
We included a few fun gifts with the sledding Groupon that will create memories as well: A sled, a Gingerbread house kit, Hot Cocoa & the movie Frozen (for a family movie night), and a kid’s snow shovel for having fun in the snow (and for building snowmen).
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”
The next idea I had was to gift a “memory” to some of our friends as well. Friends can be even harder than kids to think of gift ideas for. But one thing that always goes over well is a dinner & a movie package. Parents often get so focused on their kids at Christmastime that they forget to take care of themselves. This would be a great gift to give with some sparkling cider, and you could even add in a coupon for free babysitting while “Santa and Mrs. Claus” do some Christmas shopping. This would also be a great gift for empty nesters to give to their adult children.
Since I had a few different people I was giving this gift to, I packaged it a couple different ways. One was in these cute gift bags I got at the Dollar tree (I tucked some chocolate kisses in the bags too):
And the other was just a simple gift basket with a dinner voucher, mini Martinelli’s (Dollar Tree) and some chocolate truffles.
“Baby It’s Cold Outside”
My husband’s main gift this Christmas is a year of date nights (1 for each month). All of my ideas for that will be in my later posts, but here is one of them. This can be done for a spouse, or a couple:
I chose to do a Groupon for a soak in the mineral hot springs about an hour from where we live, but there are so many options you can do with this theme (sledding, skiing, a getaway in the mountains, etc.). I included s’mores, a blanket, truffles, and some cute mugs.
What fun ideas do YOU have for gifting memories?
Katie Clark says
These ideas are so awesome. I love how you are giving you kids gifts that you can do together to make memories with you and each other. That’s so smart – I keep thinking that Jack has way too many toys, and I think this would be a great solution (because I do love giving gifts. It’s just hard when you have so much stuff already!) I wish I could be as creative as this…but I’m glad I stumbled on this so I can steal all these ideas for my family. They thank you in advance!
Kendra says
These are such fun ideas! I am all about making memories instead of giving them tons of gifts!