Gifting. Reimagined! Part 3
Conscious Gifting
It takes courage!
In Part 1 of our Gifting Reimagined Series, we talked about Conscious Gifting—what it is and how to do it. In Part 2, we focused on how to give locally even for those who live far away. Today is just for fun and getting our creative juices flowing!
Committing to Conscious Gifting Creates Confidence
Instead of worrying about being judged as cheap or your gifts as insufficient, change your mindset to know you are being creative, caring, and most of all conscious!
Summon your strength to buck the status quo and the persistent patriarchal programming that proclaims—worth is tied to the price tag of tangible things.
Commit to conscious gifting and see how this one decision creates confidence that will spread within you and to your loved ones. It’s a beautiful experience!
Ask Yourself:
In what ways can I be personal and creative in my conscious gifting this year?
What creative, caring, and conscious gift would I like to receive from my loved ones? You may have to drop some hints.
Favorite Gifts
My favorite gifts are intangible. In our family, we call them experience gifts. Even with all the travel and health restrictions of late, our ability to gift consciously is truly limited only by our creativity—and our mindset. It took some training for my kids to appreciate experience gifts, but now they sometimes even request them!
Experience gifts have the added benefits of anticipation, they are often done with others, and their memories can last a lifetime. There’s nothing to maintain, dust, clean, repair, insure, or eventually move, try to sell, donate, or worse, trash.
To give younger children the feeling of having a thing to open, put a picture that represents the experience in a box with a note describing the details, or keep the specifics a surprise!
Experience Gift Ideas
Some of these will need to wait until it’s safe, but they will help get your creative juices flowing:
Plan a camping or backpacking trip together
Visit a local farm sanctuary and connect with animals and nature
Pack a picnic with your loved one’s favorite foods, pick a new beach, park, playground, or meadow to explore
Plant a tree in a loved one’s name if they are long-distance or plant one (or 10!) together for those living locally
For the animal lovers in your family, try eating animal-free for a month with a positive attitude. Trust me, this would be appreciated beyond your wildest imagination!
Acts of Service—make a meal or two with the promise of cleaning up, taking someone’s car in for service, airport runs, babysitting
Children/Tweens don’t have much money and usually like giving acts of service gifts. They might just need to have the idea suggested and then appreciated no matter the effort since we want to foster this type of gift-giving mindset
Kids can give their parents hand-made coupons to mow the lawn, groom the dog, clean the garage, or weed the garden
One year, my kids surprised me with an animated movie they made about green smoothies
Teens can give their parents quality time together—that’s what we crave most! A win-win since the memories created will turn into a shared gift for them, too, even if they don’t appreciate it at the moment
Parents can give tweens vouchers—for extra time playing video games, staying up late, picking the family movie or game night, dinner and dessert of choice, or a city bus pass
Teens and young adults might like a coffee or lunch date, or dinner for them and their best friend or partner. All of my teens love thrift shops so a day of thrifting could be fun. A subscription to Audible or Spotify would count as an experience gift in my opinion.
Other Non-Tangible Gift Ideas
Having a mass, meditation, or other religious service said in someone’s honor
Donating to someone’s favorite charity in their name
Needless to say, you could really go unique and Give a Clairvoyant Reading wink wink!
Gift a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription box, which would support local farmers and surely delight the recipient every week
PS Whatever you do, please just don’t ever buy balloons at any time of year. They are single-use plastic, suffocate sea life, and maim or kill animals on land, and the birds in our skies.
Podcast Recommendation!
This episode of The Happiness Lab dovetails beautifully with todays's blog post.
I LOVED it and hope you will, too! LMK!
Tune in next week to see what our family is doing for the first time this year!
This experience was literally one of the most stressful of my life! And that is saying a LOT given I’d already overcome years of infertility trying to get these amazing kids, survived cancer while completing grad school, and moved internationally three times in two years.