Over the past few years, gift giving seems to continue to get harder and harder. Everyone in my family is 25+ and we don’t have any little ones running around. Also, we are very fortunate to have everything we need. Not only is it hard to find an item that they will love, but they always ask what I would like and I’m always left speechless – I honestly don’t know what to say.
After spending hours researching the best gift to give my Dad one holiday season, I had an aha moment – why not give him a gift certificate for him and I to go play golf at a course he hasn’t played before. He loves to play and usually plays at his home course weekly. Plus, it will give us time to spend together, which honestly is the most important thing and something I value more than anything.
And so the tradition was born to start regularly gifting experiences to my family for birthdays and holidays!
I can’t begin to describe how meaningful these gifts has become. A lot of these “experiences” have become some of my favorite memories with my family and I’m so grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to try new adventures locally with them.
(While I typically focus on experiences that I can do with my parents or my brother + sister-in-law, experiences, in general, are great (last minute) gifts to give to anyone on your list – especially someone who is hard to shop for.)
Every holiday season, I often find it difficult to identify a new experience for a gift that year, so I wanted to create a round up of experiences that I have gifted or received. While 2020 may not allow us to do all of these experiences this year, we should (fingers crossed) be able to do most of them in the new year!
Without further ado, here’s some of my experiential gifts
- Tickets to a sporting event
- Cooking Class (Houston friends, I highly recommend Well Done Cooking Classes)
- Dinner or lunch at the receivers favorite place (or place they’ve been wanting to try)
- Night doing Axe Throwing or TopGolf
- Wine/Beer/Spirit/Coffee Tasting or Education Class
- High Tea
- Tickets to a play/musical
- Brewery Crawl
- Indoor Skydiving
- Spa Day
- Kayaking or hiking
- Trip somewhere
- Walking tour of your city
- Escape Room
- Miracle Fruit Flavor Tripping Party (if you haven’t heard of the Miracle Fruit, here’s a link to an article about it and the idea of the Flavor Tripping Party. I’ve doing it a couple of times and it truly feels like you’re flavor tripping every time you do it)
- A way to make one of their favorite hobbies feel new
- Candle making workshop (Houston friends, Fourth + Nomad offers these and their candles are fabulous)
- Cake decorating class
- Workout class (with a recovery meal/smoothie)
- Racing experiences
- Flower arrangement class
- Behind the scenes access to the zoo
P.S. You can either buy a gift certificate/ticket from the place offering the experience or you can easily create one on Canva, including this adorable one! I hope this was helpful to brainstorm some experiences that would make for the perfect gift this holiday season!
Have you given experiences before? What’s been your favorite adventure you’ve experienced with a loved one?
