Okay, so: my parents are much better off than I am, and they like nice stuff. Read: good quality, interesting, beyond my price range. I usually get my father black pudding, pate, exotic meats, but I’ve done that for the last couple of years and it’s getting a bit old.
So, here’s my thought. What I’m good at is art. Drawing, painting, ink, pencils, charcoal. I can do that, and I can do it to a pretty professional standard. My dad’s tastes run down just the same lines as the Dope: astrophysics, science, philosophy. He likes the strange and weird, too, but interesting, clever weird. Think Philip K Dick stuff. What’s something I can illustrate - an idea, concept, map of reactions; something he’ll find interesting and possibly something he didn’t know before now?
Please help me out here. It’s difficult getting gifts for people who make a lot more money than you do, and I feel like this idea has real potential if I can just hit on the right…thing.
Speaking as a father, my most cherished gift from my oldest son is a baseball he autographed and put in a display case. Investment of about $5 and ten seconds of his time.
Point is, I’m sorry that you feel you need to impress your father with valuable or exotic things. Draw a picture of the two of you at a place you’ve both imagined going but never have yet. Show him that a dream he shared with you as a child still lives in his son years later. If you ever get to that place, take a photograph to match the drawing.
Expanding on Casey1505, you could draw the two of you together in a Blade Runner or Total Recall type of setting (both taken from works by Philip K. Dick).
If I buy something, I feel it should be something he likes and wouldn’t necessarily buy for himself. I feel like that’s a basic gift-giving principle, unless someone needs something.
I am planning to create something here. But a picture like that…we don’t really have any shared goals or dreams like that. Although actually, you have given me an idea. He used to tell us D&D style bedtime stories as kids - he wrote one of them up into a proper kids’ book but never got it published. I could illustrate it as a comic. I might make a start on that but keep my eye out for a backup, as that might be too big a project to tackle so close to Christmas.