My sister-in-law bought herself a Le Creuset casserole dish three days before Christmas last year. Three days. I was already halfway through wrapping the exact same one in Fired Earth Green. I stood in my kitchen holding a sheet of brown paper and genuinely considered screaming.
She does this every year. Not on purpose, I don’t think. She just sees something, decides she wants it, and orders it before the thought has time to cool. Perfume, kitchen bits, books, those expensive socks from Arket that everyone suddenly cares about. All bought. All owned. All sitting in her house by the time anyone gets a chance to gift them.
I know this isn’t just me. Everyone has at least one person like this in their life and the usual advice is absolutely useless. Get them an experience. Get them a voucher. Get them a hamper.
Hampers. God. I need to talk about hampers.
Hampers are not gifts
I’m sorry, but I will die on this hill. A hamper is what you buy when you’ve left it too late and you need something that looks expensive in the photo but costs £40 and contains crackers. There’s always crackers. And some chutney you’d never choose for yourself. Maybe a tiny jar of honey with a wax seal on it and a bag of ground coffee that’ll get shoved behind the regular Nescafé and forgotten about.
They photograph well. I’ll give them that. On a John Lewis product page with some tasteful fairy lights in the background, a hamper looks like the answer. In real life it’s a wicker basket full of things nobody asked for, and the basket itself ends up holding shoes by the front door for the next six years.
If you’re buying a hamper because you genuinely think the person will love the contents, fair enough. But if you’re buying one because you’ve run out of ideas and it seems like a safe bet, you already know in your gut that it’s not right. Trust that instinct.
Stop trying to find the gap in their collection
Here’s what changed things for me. I stopped trying to figure out what the person didn’t already own, because that’s a game you can’t win. If they’re the type who buys everything they want, you’ll always be a step behind.
Instead I started asking a different question. What would they never think to buy for themselves?
Not because it’s too expensive or too hard to find. Because it literally wouldn’t cross their mind. People who have everything tend to buy in very predictable patterns. They replace what they already know they like. They upgrade things they already use. But they rarely go looking for something completely unexpected, something that doesn’t fit into any category they already shop in.
My dad is a perfect example. He’s got every tool known to man. Enough fishing gear to open a shop. Wardrobe full of fleeces from Mountain Warehouse. What he hasn’t got is anything on his walls that means something personal to him. He’d never walk into a gallery or a homeware shop and buy art for himself. It’s just not something he thinks about.
So for his 65th I had a print made of the Ordnance Survey map centred on the village where he grew up. Found a company that lets you choose the exact grid reference and they print it on proper heavy paper. Framed it myself from Hobbycraft, which was a bit of an ordeal because I am terrible at mitred corners, but it worked. He put it up in his shed, which for my dad is basically the Louvre. Still there two years later.
Cost me about twenty-five quid plus the frame. And it was better than any of the £80+ gifts I’d panicked over in previous years.
The spaces people forget about
This is the thing I keep coming back to. When I’m stuck, I stop thinking about what the person wants and start thinking about where they spend their time. Because most people, even the ones who buy themselves everything, have rooms or corners of their home that are completely neglected.
A friend of mine works from home in what is technically a bedroom but functions more like a storage cupboard with a desk in it. Beige walls. A lamp from 2014. One of those motivational posters that came with the frame from Argos. She buys herself plenty of nice things, but never for that room because in her head it’s “just the office.” For her birthday I found a print from an illustrator on Etsy who does these gorgeous botanical line drawings, had it framed, and she nearly cried. Ten months later it’s still the first thing she mentions when people come over for a video call.
The home bar is another one. Everyone I know who’s built one has spent all their money on the drinks and the glassware and then run out of enthusiasm before decorating it. That’s a massive opportunity. A vintage-style tin sign from somewhere like Not On The High Street. A neon light with something daft written on it. A proper cocktail recipe book that’s designed to sit out rather than shoved in a drawer.
On the neon thing, actually, I got a custom LED sign made for my brother’s 40th a couple of years ago. Had his favourite ridiculous saying put on it in warm white, made by a company called Neon Daddy who do personalised ones from their workshop in Berkshire. It’s above his bar now. He brings it up every time I visit, which is both flattering and slightly annoying because I’d love to move on to a different topic occasionally. But that’s how you know a gift landed, isn’t it. When the person won’t shut up about it.
I’m going to contradict myself about experiences
Right. So I’m not really an experiences-over-things person. I find the whole concept a bit smug, if I’m honest, like when people say they don’t own a television. But I have to admit that when experience gifts work, they properly work. The problem is they almost never do, because people buy the voucher and then nobody books anything.
I’ve got a Red Letter Days envelope somewhere in my house from 2022. Haven’t opened it. Don’t even know what’s in it anymore. Might be a spa day. Might be a driving experience. Doesn’t matter because it’s expired now and it lives behind the microwave.
The way to make an experience gift actually land is to do the work yourself. Book the restaurant. Choose the date. Sort the babysitter. Tell the person what time to be ready and nothing else. My other half did this once, booked a table at The Alverton in Truro for our anniversary, arranged everything, didn’t even tell me where we were going until we pulled into the car park. I’m still talking about it and that was four years ago.
So yes. Experiences are good. But only if someone else handles every single bit of the planning. A voucher is not a gift. It’s a task.
Actual food gifts, since I’ve already ruined hampers
I realise I spent a whole section destroying hampers so I should probably offer something better.
If the person loves food, get specific. One thing, chosen properly, beats a basket of twelve random items every time. I bought my mate a hot sauce trio from the Hot Ones website, the one from the YouTube show, and he genuinely wouldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. Fourteen quid.
For cheese people, I’ve never found better than The Courtyard Dairy up in Settle. Tiny shop, proper farmhouse stuff, raw-milk cheeses you won’t find in a supermarket. They’ll put a selection together and post it. It’s not cheap but it’s the kind of thing that makes someone go quiet for a second because they can’t believe how good it tastes. That’s a reaction you’re never getting from a Tesco Finest hamper.
Coffee subscriptions are solid too. Pact is the obvious one, but I prefer finding somewhere local to the person I’m buying for. There’s a roastery in Penryn called Origin that does gift subscriptions, and knowing the beans come from ten minutes down the road makes it feel less like a generic present and more like something I actually thought about.
The book trick
Books are underrated for the person who has everything. Most of those people buy themselves the books they already know they want, the ones on the front table at Waterstones, the ones all over Instagram. So your job is to find them one they didn’t know existed.
I gave my sister-in-law, the Le Creuset woman herself, a copy of Wintering by Katherine May. She’d never heard of it. Wouldn’t have picked it up in a shop. Finished it in three days and lent it to two friends. That’s the sweet spot: a book about something adjacent to their interests but from a direction they wouldn’t have approached on their own.
If you want to go bigger, secondhand bookshops are gold for this. I found a first edition of Northern Lights in Falmouth once for twelve quid, which felt criminal. Beautiful hardback editions of books someone loved as a teenager make brilliant gifts because they carry memory as well as the book itself.
Put a note in it
Whatever you buy, write something. I don’t mean “To Sarah, Happy Birthday, love Tom” on the inside of a card from WHSmith. I mean an actual few lines about why you chose that specific thing and what it made you think of.
I know. Feels a bit much. Especially if you’re not a words person. But I promise you, the note will get a bigger reaction than whatever it’s attached to. My dad kept the one I wrote with that map print. Folded it up and put it in his bedside drawer. I wasn’t supposed to find out but obviously my mum told me, because mums operate under a completely different set of information-sharing rules to the rest of us.
A present with a story attached stops being an object and starts being a memory. And I’ve never met anyone, not even the most impossible-to-buy-for person alive, who had enough of those.
So where does that leave us
Honestly I think I’ve just talked myself in a circle. The answer to “what do you buy someone who has everything” is always the same and it’s always slightly annoying to hear. You buy them something personal. Something that shows you’ve been paying attention. Something they’d never get for themselves.
I know that’s not a neat answer. I know people want a list of ten products with links and prices. But the best gifts I’ve ever given have cost between twelve and forty quid and the only thing they had in common was that I’d actually thought about the person rather than the present.
Except the Le Creuset incident. I’m never getting over that. I’m still out thirty-five quid and a sheet of wrapping paper.