A baby's first Christmas, from a grandmother on her fifth
The baby will not remember one minute of it. You will remember all of it. That tells you exactly who the gifts are really for — and there are only three worth the name.
Every year somebody asks me what to buy a baby for their first Christmas, and every year I give the same unpopular answer: almost nothing. A six-month-old wants the wrapping paper and your face. The mountain of toys is for the adults, and the adults deserve better than a mountain. What a first Christmas actually calls for is three things — one for the tree, one for the shelf, one for the mantel — and every one of them is really a gift to the person that baby will be in twenty years.
01The first ornament
This is the one tradition I will defend to the last. One ornament, bought or made the year they were born, with their name and the year on it. It goes on the tree every December for the rest of your life, and when they set up their own first tree in some little apartment, it goes with them. I have watched a grown man get quiet holding the ornament from his first Christmas. That is what you are buying — not a decoration, a future.
Get it personalized. The name and the year are the whole point. The small makers do these beautifully, and the difference between a good one and a drugstore one is about eight dollars and forty years.
02The book you write in, not the one you read
Board books multiply on their own; you will never need to buy one. The book a first Christmas needs is the memory book — the one where somebody writes down what actually happened. Who was there. What the baby laughed at. What went wrong with the ham. Fill in three pages a year and by the time they can read, there is a whole childhood in one place, in your handwriting, which is the part that will matter.
The trick is picking one simple enough that it actually gets filled in. The beautiful five-hundred-prompt ones become guilt in a drawer. Fewer pages, better questions.
03The stocking that comes down every year after
Buy the good stocking now — knit, with their name on it — and it hangs beside yours for the next eighteen Christmases. This is the quiet genius of the first-Christmas stocking: it is the one gift that shows up again every single year, getting more theirs each time. The matching-stockings-on-the-mantel photograph takes about four Decembers to become the picture everybody loves best.
And if there is an older brother or sister feeling invisible this year, this is the moment for a small “big sibling” something too. In our house that job is done by a certain bedtime book about questions, but the principle is the thing: the baby won't notice being skipped; the four-year-old absolutely will.
04And for the grandparents asking what to bring
Tell them the truth: the baby needs nothing, so bring the thing the parents can't justify buying themselves. One beautiful heirloom-grade toy beats eleven plastic ones — and if they simply must do a pile, point them at diapers in the next two sizes up, which is the single most gratefully received gift in the history of first Christmases. Then hand them the camera. Somebody has to be in charge of the pictures, and it should be the person who cries at them.
One for the tree, one for the shelf, one for the mantel. Everything else under the paper is for the grown-ups — and that's fine, as long as everybody admits it.
The full Christmas gift guide
Every age from newborn to twelve, at under $25, under $50 and worth-the-splurge — hand-picked, with the boutiques that stock them.
