Christmas gifts - what are you doing for folks you usually see in person but won't this year?

[SKL]

Self-explanatory title.

The family I buy for range in age from about 12 to late 70s.

[Carol in Cal.]

A long time ago for reasons that I won’t go into I took the position that family I see at Christmas all gets presents, as do friends I see at Christmas, and if I don’t see someone in person I don’t give them anything.  I am tentatively planning to stick to this this year, even though I had already started to shop a bit.  I am terrible at mailing things, and we don’t gift lavishly anyway.  So I’m mostly saving stuff for next year.

[Farrar]

I have my mother's stocking. I'm stuffing it and boxing the whole thing up so she can open it on Christmas morning. She'll probably be able to see my step-sister, since they live in the same town, but I know it's not quite the same. We rarely see other family at Christmas, so same old same old for them. If I see friends, it's always in passing, here have some cookies sort of a thing anyway, and I'll continue that, just in the context of outdoor hellos and not holiday parties.

[Spryte]

We are still giving gifts as usual.  We will just have to mail or drop off on porches.  

I would prefer to go a different route, and make things more simple.  Our outside-the immediate-family list is ridiculously long (26 people).  We have a large extended family with an inflexible  gift tradition.  

Mailing things is not my strong suit, but I’m making an effort to order easy to mail items as gifts, at least.  

 

Oops!  Maybe not enough coffee today,  are you asking if we are still exchanging gifts, or asking for gift ideas?   No ideas here, ha!  I’m off to drink more coffee now, apparently my brain needs it.  

Edited November 15, 2020 by Spryte
Reading comprehension issues

[Alicia64]

Photo mugs using your own pictures. People LOVE these.

🥰

W.

[Junie]

I am planning to send physical gifts to my only niece -- she's 2.  Everyone else will get gift cards.  It's actually going to work out to be a good year for gift cards as my mom and my sister are both moving into new homes this month.  And my brother has a very small space and I don't want gifts to be burden because he has nowhere to put them.

[Kareni]

My daughter has been living and working in South Korea for seven years. We generally get together on Zoom and open gifts together.

Her gifts are generally books, games, and a calendar that we order from Book Depository as they have free worldwide shipping. Sometimes we send food and toiletries through iHerb.com as they have low shipping fees to South Korea. Once in a great while (this year), we mailed a box. (A large flat rate box costs over $100 to mail, so you can understand why this is a rare event.)

Regards,

Kareni

[athena1277]

Sometimes if I need to send a gift, I like to order from Amazon and have it shipped to the recipient.  It’s usually a niece or nephew, so I text the parents that it’s coming and they will intercept and wrap it for me if gift wrap isn’t available.

[alisoncooks]

I give the adults in my family the same thing every year. I'm lazy like that. They get a photo calendar, mostly pics of my kids and their artwork. I'll either see them in person or mail the calendars this year. 

For children: I'll be doing nothing different. The presents will either be delivered in person or given later or handed off via another relative. I'm not buying things any differently than I normally would. 

[Junie]

49 minutes ago, athena1277 said:

Sometimes if I need to send a gift, I like to order from Amazon and have it shipped to the recipient.  It’s usually a niece or nephew, so I text the parents that it’s coming and they will intercept and wrap it for me if gift wrap isn’t available.

Target is good for this, too.  I like to use Target to send care packages to my dc in college.  I just order enough to qualify for free shipping.

[math teacher]

2 hours ago, Dreamergal said:

We don't exchange Christmas Gifts except for two friends here. Most of our gift exchange is during Diwali which coincidentally was yesterday.

Usually I don't put much thought into it, shove it in a gift bag and hand it over. 

I ordered online and could have sent it directly, but this year, more than ever I wanted the tactile experience of opening gifts.

I also have been collecting a bunch of little gifts, making a few which I never did because I did not have the skills, I can machine sew a little now. I could only cook before.

This year DD and I made cards, wrapped some, put some in gift bags I made and put everything in an ugly amazon cardboard box which we seem to have a lot of,  for each family. We did not wrap the box, but loosely taped it and put it in the garage for 3 days before dropping them off on porches yesterday. We received a bunch too on our porch from friends dropping them off . We went around "visiting" people as in drop stuff on the porch, call them, they open door with masks, we wear masks, stand far apart, wish and wave madly. It was weird but nice to actually see people without a door or windows between us. We have kept our gifts in the garage for extra safety for 3 days because I could not bear to sanitize them like amazon boxes and we wanted to be safe in a state where COVID cases are over a million. So we wait in anticipation to open. 

It sounds like you had a great time. When do you get to open your quarantined gifts?

[saraha]

We won't be seeing my mom or my sister so we are doing month clubs. Every month one of my kids will pick a used book and a snack to ship to my mom. For my sister they will pick an ingredient or small kitchen thing to send to my sister so that she has to call and guess the recipe that they will send her. They think it's fun and I think my mom and sister will too.

We are also paying my mom's AAA as we always do.

[Spryte]

29 minutes ago, saraha said:

We won't be seeing my mom or my sister so we are doing month clubs. Every month one of my kids will pick a used book and a snack to ship to my mom. For my sister they will pick an ingredient or small kitchen thing to send to my sister so that she has to call and guess the recipe that they will send her. They think it's fun and I think my mom and sister will too.

We are also paying my mom's AAA as we always do.

What great ideas!

[QueenCat]

Ornaments for most. More traditional toys/games for the under 8-10 crowd (just a few in that age group).