Grandparents Day Gifts: What to Give, and When It Actually Is

When it is, and why nobody can remember

National Grandparents Day is the first Sunday after Labor Day. Because Labor Day is the first Monday in September, that lands between September 7 and 13: usually the second Sunday of the month, and the first when September begins on a Monday, as it did in 2025 and will again in 2031.

The reason nobody remembers is that it is defined relative to another holiday rather than fixed to a date, so it lands anywhere from the 7th to the 13th. If you want to stop being caught out, put a recurring reminder on the third Sunday in August, three weeks before the earliest it can fall. That is also the point at which anything made to order still has time to arrive, with Labor Day in the middle.

Worth knowing because it is a useful thing to say to a grandparent who dismisses the day as invented by the card companies, which a lot of them do. It took an eight year campaign by one woman and an act of Congress, and she was a mother of fifteen who was not selling anything.

What grandparents actually keep

The pattern is consistent enough to be useful, and it has almost nothing to do with how much you spend.

If a record of the grandchildren is where you are landing, our personalized book for grandma is one, with her and a grandchild drawn in, and you can see whether it looks like them before you decide anything.

They keep the things that contain the grandchildren. They use and forget the things that mention them. A mug with a photograph printed on it is a mug. A framed drawing, a recording, a book the child appears in, a printed album of the year: those get shown to visitors, which is the tell. A gift that gets shown to other people is a gift that is doing its job weekly rather than once.

There is a reason underneath this, and it is worth understanding because it also tells you what to avoid. Most grandparents, especially the ones who do not live nearby, are working with an out-of-date version of their grandchildren. They see them at Christmas and again in the summer, and in between the children become different people. Every good gift in this category is closing that gap. Every disappointing one is a nice object with a name applied to the outside.

• Something that shows the child as they are right now. Not as a baby, not last year. This year.
• Something with a date on it. A record of one particular September gets more valuable every year. A timeless keepsake stays exactly as valuable as it was.
• Something showable. Half the pleasure of grandchildren is telling people about them.
• Something flat. This one surprises people. A large number of people over seventy are quietly thinking about how much stuff they have and who will have to deal with it, which rules out ornaments completely.

We wrote a longer piece on the specific problem of gifts for a grandmother who has everything, which is the version of this question most people are actually asking.

And if she is the one who takes the whole family to the parks every year, start with Disney gifts for grandma, which works from the trip.

When the giver is four

Most Grandparents Day gifts are bought by a parent and described as being from the children. Everybody knows this. The trick is not to hide it but to make it partly true, because the part the grandparent remembers is not the object, it is the handover.

1. Let the child make exactly one decision. Which photograph, which color, what the message says. Two minutes of involvement changes what they say when they hand it over, and that is the bit that gets retold. If the message is the hard part, Christmas messages for grandparents sorts it by the age of the child, and most of it works in September too.
2. Write the dedication in the child's actual words. Not tidied up. A four year old's real sentence, transcribed with its odd grammar intact, is worth more than anything you would compose on their behalf, and it becomes funnier every year.
3. Let them hand it over, and do not coach them. The coached version is visibly coached. The uncoached version is the story your mother tells her friends.
4. Take a photograph of the moment, because that is next year's gift.

A note on handmade things. A genuinely handmade item from a child beats almost anything bought, and the only reason this article is not just a list of craft ideas is that most families do not have the time, and a rushed craft project at nine on a Saturday night is worse than a good bought thing chosen properly. If you do have the time, handprints with a date, and a framed drawing framed properly, are the two that survive decades.

Grandparents Day gift ideas by the grandchild's age

The most useful question is not what the grandparent would like but what the grandchild can genuinely contribute. A gift built around what a child can really do at their age reads as theirs. A gift built around what an adult wishes they could do reads as yours with their name written on it, and grandparents can tell the difference from across the room.

Two notes on reading it. The rows are about ability rather than maturity, so a quiet seven year old who loves drawing belongs happily in the row above. And the last column is not a list of bad gifts in general: it is a list of gifts that take the child out of their own present. Our grandmother book fits the middle rows, since it is written for ages 3 to 12. For a baby, the dated handprint really is the better choice: the book can wait a couple of years until there is a child to read it to.

The book they can read together

There is one category of gift that solves a problem specific to this day, and it is worth calling out because most Grandparents Day gifts do not solve it.

Almost everything on a gift list is for the grandparent alone. The child has no use for it. That means the gift produces one nice moment and then sits somewhere. A book in which the grandparent and the grandchild are both characters is the rare object both of them want, which means it does not sit: it gets read, on a couch, by her, to them. Which is the scene you were actually trying to buy.

The thing that decides whether this works is whether the grandparent is genuinely drawn or merely represented. A book called something like "I Love You, Grandma" in which Grandma is a stock cartoon with gray hair is, structurally, a book about somebody else's grandmother, and a five year old notices immediately. If she is drawn from her own photograph, with her own face, it stops being a book about grandmothers in general and becomes a record of two specific people at a specific age.

It is not the right book for every family, and it is worth being plain about where it stops. It has one child and one grandmother in it, so if you want both grandparents, or three cousins, in the same story, this is not that book. It needs a clear photograph of her face, which some grandmothers dislike having taken, so ask before you use one. And if the grandchild is still a baby, see the table above. If none of that rules it out, you can see the two of them drawn together before you pay anything.

Why a child cares about appearing in a book at all is a question of its own, and we wrote about it separately: why children pore over a story they are in.

For grandfathers the equivalent problem is worse, because the category barely exists, and we gave it its own guide. For picture books about grandmothers and grandfathers that are not ours, read together on the day, see books about grandparents, sorted by situation.

Grandpa is a harder problem, and here is why

Search volumes for grandfather gifts are as high as for grandmothers and rising, and the available answers are noticeably worse. The shelves are full of mugs about golf, novelty socks, and things that say World's Best Grandpa, which is the same joke he has received eleven times.

The underlying issue is that the standard gift categories for older men are hobbies, and hobbies are guesses. What works better is the same move that works for grandmothers, applied to what he actually does with the children.

• Something about his hands. Whatever he makes, mends, grows or builds is usually the thing he would most like the grandchildren to remember, and almost nobody thinks to make a record of it.
• A recorded conversation. Ask him about his work, or his childhood, and record it on a phone. Men of that generation are very often never asked, and the recording becomes the most valuable object in the family within twenty years.
• A day of being useful together. Fixing something with a grandchild beats being taken out to lunch, for a lot of grandfathers.
• A book he is in, for exactly the same reason as above, and it is the one thing on this list that the grandchild also wants.

We make one book for him as well, The Unfinished One, set in a grandfather's shed full of small wooden animals, with your child and him both drawn from your photos. It suits a grandfather who makes things with his hands and never tells the stories behind them. It is a weaker fit for a grandfather whose pleasures are all outdoors and in company, and the grandpa guide linked above goes through the difference honestly.

The thing to avoid is the joke gift. It is fine as a stocking stuffer and it is a poor use of the one day a year that is about him.

Grandparents Day at school

A large number of American elementary schools hold a Grandparents Day event in the week around the date, and it catches families out for two reasons. It is often on a weekday rather than the Sunday, and the invitation frequently arrives with under two weeks of notice.

If your school does this, two practical things. Ask early whether the event is on the Friday or the Sunday, because grandparents traveling in need more notice than the newsletter gives. And if the grandparents cannot come, which is common and quietly upsetting for the child, plan the alternative in advance rather than on the morning: a video call from the classroom if the school allows it, or a designated stand-in, which most schools are entirely relaxed about.

For the gift itself, school events usually involve the child making something in class, which means anything you buy is in addition rather than instead. That argues for one thing that arrives at their house, rather than something carried to the event.

If they are coming, brief them the night before. The teacher's name, the name of the child's best friend, where the child sits, what the class has been reading. It costs you five minutes and turns a visitor into someone who knows the room, which is exactly what the child wants to show off. And tell the grandparent to hold on to whatever gets made in class, however lopsided, because the child will ask about it at the next visit.

When they live far away

Distance changes what a good gift is, because the gap it has to close is larger and the day itself cannot be spent together.

Give something that creates a repeated activity rather than a single moment. A book they can read aloud over a video call is worth more than an ornament, because it converts one Sunday into a thing you do together every week. Long distance grandparents consistently report that having something specific to do on a call is the difference between calls that continue and calls that quietly stop.

Ship it directly, and time it to land on the Friday. A package arriving on the day is a different experience from a gift handed over on a visit six weeks later. Ask whether the dedication or gift note goes inside the box rather than in an email. Our books can go straight to the grandparent's address with your dedication printed inside, which saves the second trip to the post office.

Send something handwritten alongside it. Even scribble. For a grandparent who does not see the children often, handwriting is physical evidence of a person at a particular age, and it is the thing that ends up in a drawer that gets opened.

Send photographs of the ordinary, not the special. They have seen the birthday pictures. What they have not seen is the child at the kitchen table on a Tuesday, which is what they are actually missing.

What to write in the card, or in the dedication

Most notes to grandparents say the same four or five words, and that is fine for a card that gets opened, stood on a shelf for a week and recycled. For anything meant to be kept, the inside of a book, the back of a framed drawing, the label on a recording, it is worth ten more minutes, because the words are the part that gets reread every time the object comes out.

• Ask the child one question and write down the answer exactly. What is the best thing at Grandma's house? What does Grandpa always say? The answer will be odd and specific and better than anything an adult would write.
• Use a detail only your family knows. The tin with the good cookies, the song in the car, the name the grandparent calls the dog. One specific object says more than any adjective.
• Put the date and the child's age. A line like "written by (name), age four, the week of Grandparents Day" is the one people read out loud ten years later.
• Keep it short. Three lines survive. A full paragraph gets skimmed, and the good sentence gets lost inside it.
• Leave out the word best. The world's best grandma is probably already printed on a mug she owns.
• Let the child sign it themselves, in whatever state their name comes out. The wobbly signature is evidence of an age, and that is what makes it worth keeping.

If the words are going inside one of our books, one thing is different: the dedication is written by you and printed word for word after the story, so whatever you type is exactly what gets read, with no template around it. In our grandmother book the dedication is addressed to the grandchild, because the book is theirs, which means it is a lovely place for Grandma to write a line herself if she is in on the plan.

How to spend the day, not just mark it

The woman who campaigned for this day wanted young people to spend time with older ones. The gift works best as the start of that rather than the whole of it, and none of the ideas below cost more than an afternoon.

1. Ask three questions nobody has asked. What was your street like when you were my age? What did you get in trouble for? What was your first job? Let the child ask them, and record the answers on a phone.
2. Open one box of old photographs. Write names and places on the back while someone in the room still knows them. It is the task every family means to do and almost none gets around to.
3. Cook the recipe that has never been written down. The grandparent teaches it, the child writes it out, spelling and all, and the card goes in a frame or a recipe box.
4. Take the photograph nobody takes. Grandparent and grandchild close together, in ordinary clothes, not lined up behind a table. Most families have far fewer of these than they think.
5. Read the gift together, if it is a book. On the couch, before anyone leaves, so the first reading is part of the day.
6. Book the next visit before you go. A date on the calendar is a gift of its own to a grandparent who quietly wonders whether visits are getting fewer.

If you cannot be together on the day, almost all of this survives a video call: the questions, the photo box held up to the camera, the same recipe cooked in two kitchens at once. It is less than a visit and a great deal more than a card, and it sets up a reason for the next call.

Ordering in time

The practical section, and the one that decides whether any of the above happens.

Anything made to order is produced after you buy it, so the number you need is production plus shipping, not the shipping estimate at checkout. For a September date that is easier than at Christmas, when every made-to-order supplier in the country is at capacity, but it still needs a few weeks, and Labor Day always falls in the middle of them.

• Three weeks before is comfortable for anything personalized, so around the middle of August in most years.
• Add a week if you need a photograph from somebody else. Waiting on a person is always the step that slips, and for a gift involving a grandparent you often need a photo of the grandparent, which nobody has a good recent one of.
• Shipping to a third address needs a few more days and a check that the gift note is included.
• If you are late, print a picture of the gift, put it in a card with the arrival date, and let them have two moments instead of one. Nobody remembers which day a present arrived.

For our own books it is simple. Each one is printed in the United States after you order it and checked by a real artist before it leaves, and the book page and the cart show the delivery dates before you pay. Check them against the day, and leave room for the step that actually slips, which is finding a good photograph of the grandparent. The drawing itself comes first and costs nothing, so you can start with the preview tonight and order once the photo question is settled.

If this year is the first one without them

It is worth saying, briefly, because a lot of people arrive at this search in exactly that situation and every gift guide skips it.

The day is hard the first time, and the instinct to ignore it is understandable. What a number of families do instead, and find easier than expected, is make the day about the record rather than the absence: writing down the stories while the people who heard them are still around, finding the photographs nobody has scanned, asking the surviving grandparent the questions everybody assumed there would be time for.

If there are young children, they will remember less than you think and will want to know more than you expect. Anything you make now that fixes a grandparent in a form a child can hold, a photograph, a recording, a story with them in it, is worth doing this year rather than next. That is the honest reason a lot of people buy the kind of book we make, and it is not a cheerful reason, but it is a real one.