LDS Parents are sometimes very difficult to get a Christmas present for. When we cleaned out my parents house to help them move, I found every gift that we had given them for Christmas since we were married. Needless to say, we got them all back. My parents said we could keep them because their new home was going to be smaller and had less storage.
My husband’s parents aren’t any easier. Last year two of their kids gave them the exact same . Salt Lake Temple sculpture. They have them like book ends on top of their large entertainment center. My father-in-law usually gets atleast one of the new LDS Books in triplicate every Christmas. Sometimes though it’s best not to reley on LDS Bookstores to supply us with ideas. They can instead just supply us with a few supplies. Let me list out a few of the best gifts that my husband and I have been able to give to our parents.
Their favorite one was a memory book. This book had each grandchild write down a memory that they had of them. Something that they had done with them that would always be apart of who they were. Next to the letter, we had a collage of pictures of that grandchild.
Another really good one is very similar. Now that I am a mother of older children, I’ve told them this is what I want from them every Christmas. Each child is to scrapbook a page of themselves. One page that lets me know what has meant something to them that year. Some families have this be all that the extended families do for each other. They make one page and then color copy it so that each extended family gets one so that distant cousins can understand one another. There are even LDS Scrapbooking Supplies available.
One year, I actually did this for an anniversary, but it would work for Christmas too. I gave out white squares of paper and some fabric crayons. I told them that words would come out backwards so they had to be careful, but each person with fabric crayons made a quilt block. When I got them back, I sewed them all together and we tied the quilt together. This quilt is still a treasure to my in-laws.
This year I am trying to get my kids to write lyrics to a few Christmas songs. One for each family about that family. We will perform them when we get together. The lyrics will be typed up and framed like a gold record and we will have the signatures of all my kids.
If you have any ideas, let me know. We can post them too.
