The traditional gifting timeline for mums - especially when it's new mum gifts - goes something like this:
- Birth: stuffed toy or onesie for the baby, plus flowers for the mum if you’re being especially thoughtful
- Subsequent birthdays/Christmas etc.: birthdays, wine or chocolate
- End of timeline
With the line from Love Actually’s Mia forever seared in our brains (before Alan Rickman gave her that necklace): “I don't want something I need. I want something I want - something pretty,” it’s no wonder we’re so averse to gifts that might actually be useful, even though useful gifts for mums might be what they want most.
I have a sort of internal ranking of the usefulness/boringness of would-be gifts when I’m deciding what to get someone. For example:
- Accessories for the car: very useful, therefore extremely boring.
- A cookbook: quite practical, can get away with it as a gift as long as I combine it with something pretty
- Jewellery: a proper treat
But thinking about the best gifts I’ve ever received, I’ve got to acknowledge that this ranking system kind of sucks.
Here are - in no particular order - some of my favourite gifts I’ve ever received:
- Car seat gap fillers (to stop you dropping stuff down the side of the seats)
- A day with a home organiser
- A saucepan
- A hoover
- Dinner plates
See the common theme? They’re all things I’ve got a ton of use from, and every time I’ve used them, I’ve thought of the lovely person who got it for me. And that’s the thing with practical gifts for mums: the best ones become part of your daily life, not just something that gathers dust.
They’re also winners because each time I knew someone was really thinking about me. You can give anyone a bath bomb, but car seat gap fillers? That’s a weird gift to give someone, unless for example they were just about to start a new job where they’d be doing a lot of driving and would have to eat on the go - then it’s a gift that’s not only useful, but personal too (to be clear, that was indeed my situation, and they saved no end of McDonald’s fries from the dreaded abyss under the car seat).
There’s another layer that comes into play when it’s mums you’re talking about.
Sometimes the nice stuff literally can’t be used. That bath bomb - like so many so-called self care gifts for mums - will probably sit in the bathroom taunting her every time she looks at it, just wishing she was able to have a nice long bath.
I tend to think that a gift should make the recipient's life better in some way, so especially for mums, pretty much all of whom have way too much on their plate, it’s just so much more likely that a gift that takes something off her plate is going to be more appreciated than something pretty with no real use - especially if that something pretty actually ends up giving her an extra job like having to find a home for yet another thing.
So my go-to gifts for mums now tend to all be practical. I still rate physical things as nice gifts, but as well as looking nice, they have to have a practical purpose (I’m a big fan of really nice water bottles right now because mums seem to be chronically dehydrated).
But I think practical services really take the prize for great mum gifts. Cleaners, meal deliveries, home organisers, laundry - since I’ve become a mum this is the stuff that makes me 100x happier. And of course, self care services like spa treatments are also a really nice way to show someone you see what they need - with an offer of babysitting if needed!
So there we go, my treatise on practical gifts. Next time you’re buying for a mum, don’t forget that getting something she can actually use is the real luxury.