This is a thread for sweeping generalizations, and brushes wide enough to paint barns.
I’m not talking about buying gifts for a friend or loved one- you will (ideally) know them well enough to get something personal. I’m talking about the little brother of your boyfriend, or your brother’s girlfrind.
I think shopping for girls is easy- go to The Body Shoppe, close your eyes, grab anything off the shelf, and wrap it up. However, I’m always mystified by what to get guys.
If they are young enough, I can always get a Spiderman Action Figure or something, but past a certain age… they can’t have enough hats, right?
I find shopping for men/boys, to be much harder than shopping for women/girls. I don’t have a single female relative, friend, or acquaintance who wouldn’t appreciate a nice scarf/glove/hat set, or stuff from Bath & Boy Works, etc. Accessories and toiletries in general tend to make fine and much-appreciated gifts.
Guys, on the other hand…there’s really no one-gift-fits-all solution. It’s really hard. Hell, I have trouble shopping even for the men/boys I’m close to, at least if they’re not the reading type.
I think women are much, much easier to shop for. In addition to all the things mentioned above, women usually appreciate things for the house, whereas men don’t tend to.
Part of the problem is that a woman will make such a fuss over whatever you buy, that you will end up feeling good about whatever you get her. Whereas with men, unless you’ve spent hundreds of dollars getting them a technogadget, have the same reaction to getting gifts that you put a lot of thought into as they do to socks.
Wet blankie that I am, I have to tell you that while I appreciate the thought behind Bath & Body Works gifts (and I know they’re not cheap, either!) I would just as soon NOT get that stuff. It all smells like fruit gone bad to me. Of course, I would not be so ungracious to say so if someone were to buy it for me. Nor would any other woman I know personally, although I know a few who have told me they don’t care for that stuff either.
So, yes, I think women are easier to shop for mainly because they’re trained to take the thought behind the gift into consideration. Guys are more direct. Doesn’t make 'em easy to buy for, though!
Wow, I have given grown men Spiderman Action Figures, and it seems to have worked pretty well. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to resort to this if men weren’t so difficult to shop for.
I agree, in general, I feel like women are easier to shop for, but that might be because I am a woman and I know what I like. There seem to be more generic gifts marketed toward women that are designed to be “gift-like.”
When I was first dating Mr. Del, my mother gave him a gift that was a box of assorted batteries. He uses a lot of batteries in his various gadgets, so this was a good gift that he was very happy with. I, on the other hand, would hesitate to give someone something like a box of batteries. Maybe if they made batteries in seasonal gift boxes, with a holiday scent, or something like that, it would seem more like a gift.
She also gave him a sweater that still has the price tags on it, seven years later.
Catholic guilt is making me post again … the PRICE tags weren’t on it, my mother would be horrified if she knew I was telling a bunch of strangers on the internet that she left a price tag on a gift. My point was that the tags, without the price, are still attached to the sweater.
Men are easy to shop for–if you don’t know what they want, get them a nice pocketknife.
Swiss Army knives are best. Go Victoronix, not Wenger. Wenger knives have weak locking mechanisms on the blades, & they can fold on you, & close as you use them. I know. I have the scar to prove it.
Men are impossible to buy for, even those you know well - like sons. I go through the tortures of the damned every Christmas trying to think of thinks to fill up the stockings for my grown-up sons. They’re way too old for a stocking but it’s tradition.
I usually have no trouble thinking up a main present but stocking fillers are impossible. Now, if I had daughters it would be easy peasy.
My extended family does a name-exchange for Christmas gifts. The men are called “ickies” because they’re so impossible to buy for. Our Christmas exchanges usually consist of the women getting all sorts of varied things - candles, stuff for the house, lotions, books, CDs - and the man all getting some variation of screwdriver set.
Guys are easy to shop for–just get 'em good-quality tools. They won’t even mind if they already have one of what you got, because you can never have too many tools.
That’s great, HH, unless those men are my dad, husband, or brother. My dad’s a woodworker, so any tools he doesn’t already have are really, really far out of my price range–like an $800 table saw. My brother’s a cabinetmaker, so the same applies. And my husband just isn’t into the tool thing. I mean, he wouldn’t turn his nose up tools, but he’d get far more excited about a new whisk and set of rubber spatulas.
All the Christmas gift packages for men seem to be jokey crap. Jokey crap suits my brother but I’d rather get something classier for my dad and I don’t want any jokey crap either. There isn’t the generic Body Shop type option for guys.
I don’t usually like giving gift certificates as presents. They strike me as too much like just handing someone a check and pointing them towards a store.
But if you have no idea what someone really likes, then you know you can always fall back on giving them a gift certificate. Almost anyone can find something they’d like at a major bookstore–something on the order of B. Daltons, or Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com. You know you’re not sticking someone with a gift they don’t like or won’t use, just because you felt you had to give them something.
Food, I find, is often another good option. Both men and women like to eat, AFAIK. If you like to cook, you might want to consider making a gift basket of homemade foods. Homemade stuff–homemade cookies, truffles, or what-have-you are often considered delicacies these days. How many people do you know who get homemade, made-from-scratch yummy things on a daily basis? And, really, you could put almost any sort of food thing in the basket. I once made an enormous Mason jar of homemade chicken soup as part of a Christmas gift. The family I gave it to loved it, loved it, loved it. I got requests for it the following year!
You might also be able to get a certificate from a good local restaurant for dinner for two as a gift. You could pick a restaurant that has a variety of dishes such that anyone will find something they enjoy on the menu.
Similarly, gift certificates for movies might work well, too. You wouldn’t have to pick a specific movie.
In fact, now that I think of it, a set of gift certificates–for dinner and a movie–might be a pretty good gift idea for almost anyone. You’re giving someone a night out with a friend or date; I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be happy to have one of those!
