Gifts for Grandpa From the Grandkids, Beyond the Novelty Socks

Why grandfather gifts are so bad

Two reasons, and knowing them tells you where to look instead.

The first is that hobbies are a proxy for a person. For grandmothers, gift lists default to the relationship: photographs, keepsakes, things about the grandchildren. For grandfathers they default to activities, which means the gift is about a category of man rather than about him. A framed photograph of the grandchildren works for exactly the same reasons in both cases, and it is offered far less often in the second.

The second is that men of that generation are, on average, worse at telling you what they want. Ask and you will get nothing, or fine, or do not spend money on me. This is not indifference and it should not be taken at face value: it is a habit of not asking, formed over decades, and it means the useful information has to be found rather than requested.

The four kinds that work

In rough order of how reliably they land, from families who have tried all of them.

Two of the four cost nothing at all, and the fourth you can look at free before deciding.

1. A recorded conversation. Sit down with a phone and ask him about his work, his childhood, how he met your grandmother, what his own father was like. This is the single most valuable thing on this list and it costs nothing. Men of that generation are very often never asked, and the recording becomes the most important object in the family within twenty years. Do it before you think you need to.
2. A record of what his hands do. Whatever he makes, mends, grows or builds. Photographs of the workshop, the garden, the boat, the thing half finished on the bench, printed properly rather than left on a phone. This is the part of himself he would most like the grandchildren to remember and the part nobody documents.
3. Something to do together, with a date on it. Not being taken out to lunch. A job: fixing something with a grandchild, a morning in the garden, teaching them to use a tool. For a lot of grandfathers, being useful is the preferred form of being loved.
4. A story he is in. The one gift on this list that the grandchild also wants, which means it does not sit on a shelf: it gets read, by him, to them.

What all four have in common is that none is an object about a hobby. They are records, or they are time.

They also combine well. The strongest version of this gift is often two of them at once: a morning in the workshop with a grandchild, with somebody quietly taking photographs, turns the third kind into the second. A recorded conversation that ends with him reading a story he is in to the child sitting next to him turns the first into the fourth.

Which gift fits which grandfather

The four kinds are not equally right for every man. The quickest way to choose is to start from the grandfather you actually have, not the one on the greeting card, and read across.

Most grandfathers are two rows at once, and that is useful rather than confusing: pick the gift from one row and check it against the skip column of the other. If you want to see what the story option looks like with his own face before you decide anything, our personalized book for grandpa is free to preview and takes about a minute.

How to record the conversation so it actually happens

The recorded conversation is first on the list and it is also the one that most often never gets done. Nobody decides against it. It just keeps being a good idea for next time. A few practical choices make the difference between meaning to and having it.

1. Put a date on it and tell him. A conversation that is a gift, announced in a card, gets done. One that is meant to happen casually at some point does not.
2. Use a phone and nothing else. A voice memo on a kitchen table is enough. Cameras and microphones make people perform, and he will talk better to a phone lying face down than to a lens.
3. Let a grandchild ask the first question. It changes his tone completely. Men who would give an adult a short answer will give a seven year old the whole story.
4. Ask about things, not feelings. What was your first job? What did your house smell like? What did your father do on a Saturday? Concrete questions get long answers. Questions about how he felt get a shrug.
5. Stop before he is tired. Forty minutes is plenty. A second session is easier to arrange once the first one went well.
6. Save it in two places the same day, and give him a copy. A recording that lives on one phone is one lost phone away from never having happened.

If you are stuck for questions, a short list that works with most grandfathers:

• What was the first thing you ever bought with your own money?
• Who taught you to do the thing you are best at?
• What did you want to be before you became what you were?
• What is something you fixed that you are still proud of?
• What was I like, or what was my mother or father like, at the age the grandchild is now?

The grandfather who says he wants nothing

Almost universal, and it usually means one of three things that call for different answers.

• I have too much stuff. Common past seventy and rarely said out loud, often accompanied by quiet thoughts about who will clear the house. Rules out ornaments entirely. Consumables, experiences and flat things survive.
• I do not want you spending money on me. The answer is effort rather than a cheaper object. Something that visibly took work, especially work involving the children, sidesteps it because it cannot be priced.
• I genuinely do not want objects. Then the only remaining category is the one he cannot buy for himself, which is anything containing the grandchildren, or your time.

The same three apply to grandmothers, and we went through them in more detail in gifts for Grandma from the grandchildren. The difference is that grandfathers are more likely to mean the second and less likely to say so.

The book with him in it

Worth explaining because it is the item on the list people are most skeptical about, and it is the one we make, so weigh accordingly.

The skepticism is usually a version of he would not be interested in a children's book. That is true of a children's book. It is not true of a book in which he is a character, because the object is not really for reading, it is evidence that he matters to somebody small enough to think he is the most interesting man alive.

The practical thing that makes it work is whether he is genuinely drawn rather than represented. A generic cartoon grandfather with white hair is somebody else's grandfather, and both he and the child will clock it. Drawn from his own photograph, with his own face, it becomes a record of two specific people at a specific age, which is the thing that gets kept.

One practical note if you go this route: you will need a decent photograph of him, and most families do not have a recent one, because he is the person holding the camera. Ask two weeks early. That step slips more often than the shipping does.

Where our book is not the right choice, say so to yourself honestly. If he has no workshop and nothing about sheds or carving means anything to him, the story will still be about a grandfather and a grandchild, but the recorded conversation or the booked morning may be the better main gift, with a book as the smaller one. And if the grandchildren are already teenagers, a picture book is the wrong format: skip it and put the effort into the conversation. For everyone else, you can try it with one photo of him before deciding, with no card and no account.

When the giver is a toddler

Most gifts described as from the grandkids were chosen by a parent, and the grandfather knows it. What he is actually receiving is the moment, so build that rather than hiding the arrangement.

• Let the child pick one thing. Which photo, which color, what the message says. Two minutes, and it changes what they say when they hand it over.
• Write the dedication in the child's real words, ungrammatical and unedited. It is the part that gets funnier every year.
• Do not coach the handover. The rehearsed version is obviously rehearsed and the unrehearsed one is the story he retells.
• Handprints still work, even for grandfathers who would tell you they do not care about that sort of thing. Date them.

For very young children there is one more that is disproportionately effective: a photograph of the child wearing or holding something of his. A hat, a tool, a pair of boots. It costs nothing and it says the thing nobody says out loud. The card that goes with it has its own page: Christmas messages for grandparents, with lines by age.

What grandkids can do at each age

The gift from the grandkids gets more interesting as the grandkids get older, because more of it can genuinely be theirs. A rough guide to how much of the work a child can own at each stage, so the gift is honest about who made it.

• Babies and one year olds. The gift is the child, so make it about the child: a dated handprint or footprint, a photograph of the two of them, a first birthday picture in his hat. The parent does all of it, and nobody pretends otherwise.
• Two to four. A drawing that you frame properly, a choice between two photographs, a sentence dictated for the card and written down exactly as said. This is also the age where a story he appears in is read over and over, which is the point of it.
• Five to eight. The child can ask real questions in the recorded conversation, help plan the morning together, and write their own dedication with help on the spelling. They can also tell you what grandpa is good at, which is often more accurate than what the adults would say.
• Nine to twelve. Old enough to run the recording themselves, choose and print the photographs of his work, or learn one real skill from him on a booked afternoon. At this age the gift can be entirely theirs.
• Teenagers. Time is the gift. An afternoon helping with a job, driving him somewhere, or setting up and loading a device he would actually use, and then showing him how, twice.

Whatever the age, the rule from the toddler section holds: let the child make at least one real decision, and let the handover be unrehearsed. He will know which parts were the child's, and those are the parts he will talk about.

What to avoid

Not because these are bad, but because he already has them.

The slogan. World's Best Grandpa is in the house already, probably twice, on a mug and on a t-shirt he wears to mow the lawn. It is a fine stocking stuffer and a poor use of the main gift.

The hobby guess. Unless you know for certain that he still does the thing, buying accessories for it is a bet with bad odds. Golf balls for a man whose shoulder went two years ago are a small sad reminder.

Technology he did not ask for. A tablet, a smart speaker, a digital frame that he has to set up himself. If you give a device, set it up completely first, load it, and hand it over working. An empty digital photo frame is a chore in a box.

The gift card. It says you were thinking of him for exactly as long as it took to reach the rack.

The joke about his age. Over the hill, vintage model, and the rest. Some grandfathers find these funny at a party, and very few want one as the gift that stays in the house.

When grandpa lives far away

A lot of grandfathers see the grandchildren a few times a year at most, and the usual answer, a video call, tends to go badly with men of that generation: he holds the phone too close, the child wanders off, and everybody says goodbye after four minutes. A few things work better at a distance.

• Give the call a job. Not how are you, but a thing to do: the child shows him a drawing and he tells them how to improve it, or he shows them something in the shed and they have to guess what it is for. A call with a task lasts longer and feels like time together rather than a check-in.
• Send something physical the child made. Distance makes objects matter more, not less. A drawing in the mail, a handprint, a letter in the child's own spelling. It arrives on a day that is not an occasion, which is part of why it lands.
• Record the conversation remotely. It works on a call as well, as long as someone presses record and a grandchild asks the first question.
• Choose something that travels both ways. A story he appears in with the grandchild is the rare gift that makes sense in both houses: a copy with him and a copy with the child means they are reading the same thing on different evenings, and it gives the next call something to talk about.

If you are making anything to order for a grandfather who lives far away, allow extra time for the photograph, since you cannot just take one at Sunday lunch. Ask whoever lives near him, and be specific about what you need. Our guide to what happens to the photo you upload covers the privacy side, which some grandfathers ask about before they agree.

Step-grandfathers, and the ones who are not related at all

This comes up more than gift guides acknowledge, and it is genuinely awkward to shop for, so it is worth saying out loud.

A step-grandfather, or a grandmother's partner, or the neighbor who has functioned as a grandfather for six years, is usually in a strange position on these occasions: clearly part of the family, and not quite included in the category the cards are printed for. Everybody notices, nobody mentions it, and the standard gift makes it worse by being explicitly about being a grandpa.

The move that works is to give something about the relationship rather than the title. A record of what they actually do together, a photograph of the two of them, a booked afternoon, a story in which he appears as himself. None of those require anybody to settle the question of what he is called, which is frequently a question the child has already solved privately and the adults have not.

Ask the child what they call him and use that word. Whatever comes out, including something invented, is the correct answer, and putting it on a dedication page turns an awkwardness into the best part of the gift.

The same applies in reverse when a grandfather has died and somebody else has quietly stepped into the space. Acknowledging that on the one day of the year built for it costs nothing and is usually remembered for a long time.

Grandparents Day and the other occasions

Grandfathers get fewer occasions than grandmothers, which is part of why the gifts are worse: less practice.

Grandparents Day, the first Sunday after Labor Day, is the underused one, and it is genuinely better than a birthday for this purpose because nothing competes with it. Father's Day is the other, and it is worth remembering that a lot of grandfathers are quietly left out of it once their own children are grown: a card from a grandchild on Father's Day is a small thing that lands harder than people expect.

For anything made to order, allow two to three weeks, more in December. The number that matters is production plus shipping, since these items do not exist until you order them, and add a week if you need to get a photograph of him out of somebody.

If Father's Day is the occasion you have in mind, the same thinking applies from the grandchild's side as from the child's, and our list of Father's Day gifts from kids covers the ones small hands can actually help make. Our own books are printed after you order, with the delivery dates shown before you pay, and any of these dates is comfortable if you start with the free preview a few weeks ahead.

Christmas is the other big one, and the same rules hold with a deadline attached: Christmas gifts for grandparents covers both of them at once, by the grandchild's age and by distance.

If he is not well, or this might be the last one

A number of people arrive at this search in that situation, so briefly.

The advice does not change so much as it becomes urgent. Record the conversation now. Not next visit. A phone on a kitchen table for forty minutes, asking him about his own childhood, is the thing families say afterward that they are most glad they did and most often did not do.

And if there are small grandchildren, anything that fixes him in a form a child can hold is worth making this year. A four year old will remember very little of a grandfather by nine without something concrete, and a photograph is thinner than people expect. That is an honest reason people buy the kind of book we make, and it is a heavy one rather than a cheerful one, but it is real and it is why we mention it.

Two practical things for this situation. Keep the recording simple and short, and do it in more than one sitting if he tires easily: two twenty minute conversations are better than one that he has to push through. And if he is in the hospital or in assisted living, ask the staff when he is usually at his best in the day and plan around that. A conversation at the wrong hour can go badly for reasons that have nothing to do with him.