What’s the best Christmas personalised Christmas gift you’ve ever received? I can’t think of anything better than something that’s been personalised as a gift. I also love homemade presents or experiences where you end up doing things with the ones you love rather that things that you’ll have to declutter at some point in the future.
I just love photos, always have, always will, and it makes me so happy to look at old photos printed on and stuck in a notebook or displayed on the wall. They’re also sustainable presents. If you ever decided to declutter and get rid of photos, you could either pass them on to family or recycle them (double whammy!).
When you think about it, we’ve got thousands of photos stored on our phones and computers. I don’t even bother deleting the random pictures of foreheads my children sometimes take on my phone (why do kids do that?). When I look back at old photos in my mum’s loft, there are perhaps a dozen photos of me when I was 10. I have thousands of my children at the same age. Quite literally. There’s rarely a day when I don’t take a photo. Do I look back on my phone? Rarely. What I do look at is the framed prints on my walls, fridge and desk. They make me smile every time I glance in their direction.
When My-Picture.co.uk gave me free rein to create a few festive bits and bobs for my family, I had a dozen ideas about what I wanted to order. Our Christmas tree is a weird and wonderful mix of handmade ornaments, silly photos in baubles, souvenirs we bought on our travels and fairy lights. It’s a bit like an elf vomited on a cheap tree bought during my food shop at Aldi. Nothing is colour-coordinated or sleek and we love it that way. So naturally, the first thing I decided to go for was the ornament we’d add to our tree for 2024. I settled on a pretty wooden Christmas ornament with a photo of my children, our cats and I in our Christmas pyjamas (yes, the cats also have matching pyjamas – we’re that kind of family!).
I couldn’t resist getting one of Keith, our step-dog, the first time we looked after him when he was a tiny puppy (that’s his Christmas present! – my children were so excited to hand-deliver that one this week). Both ornaments took less than a minute to add to my basket on the website – seriously quick and easy! That’s my kind of personalised gift website.
What caught my eye next was the ultimate personalised Christmas gift: an advent calendar filled with Lindt chocolates. Now that’s unusual. I’d never seen anything like it and it was only £15! There were quite a few designs to choose from and again, it just took a couple of minutes to edit it, including swapping ‘Merry Christmas’ with ‘Joyeux Noël!’ My 10-year-old daughter did that on my computer.
The quality is excellent and once opened, you can close the little cardboard doors again. I will buy more Lindt chocolates next year, close the little doors again and gift it to my mum as her 2025 advent calendar. I love nothing more than a present I can reuse or repurpose. Sustainability is cool!
My mum always has a small little calendar on her kitchen wall, where she writes down all her appointments, family birthdays and things she wants to remember. There’s never enough space for her to write anything, so I decided to gather photos from my brothers, my nephew and the whole immediate family to put together a more practical version of her calendar. My-Picture.co.uk did deliver! You could choose exactly what you wanted in terms of layout and I think my mum will have the best calendar she’s ever had to keep track of everything going on in her life. More than that, it will have the faces of the people she loves most on it. Getting photos from everyone took me a while, but the creation process was once again flawless and super quick. Five minutes at most I’d say. All done from my phone.
Since we never look at photos on our phones, I’ve decided to start making an album with three or four hundred pictures for every year. I tried using the AI assistant on My-Picture.co.uk: it didn’t work very well on my phone so I moved on to my MacBook and it look a long time to create the album. The site crashed a few times. My advice would be to just create the album from scratch, as I think the AI assistant needs fine-tuning. If you start a project like this, also make sure you save your album every few minutes. Using Safari seemed to make the issues worse, so I’d use Chrome as your browser if I were you. It’s the only one of my creations I haven’t received yet and I can’t wait to receive the album!
If you fancy gifting something more personal than a pair of socks or some cash, here’s a 10% discount code on everything (max items 10, max redemptions per user unlimited), valid till 31.12.2024: DELMEL10 on My-Picture.co.uk.
What personalised Christmas gifts would you make?
Disclosure: this is a paid advertisement but all comments and photos are my own.
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