8 Thoughtful Gifts That Require No Thought

Gift Certificates, With a Twist

Gift certificates? Really?

The last thing that most sane people will think of when considering a thoughtful present are gift cards or certificates, which most people rely on as a generic fallback to give people for whom they have no idea what else to get.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t be personalized in a meaningful way. All you need, Bryan says, is to know just one interest of the recipient.

“You may be thinking it’s best to give someone a gift certificate to Amazon or Barnes & Noble so that they can choose a book they don’t already have on a topic that they like,” she says, “but a great way to personalize that is to print out a list of books on a subject you know they are interested in that have been published in the last year or 18 months and send that along with the gift certificate.”

Putting one layer of thought behind a generic gift like this can make all the difference, as it shows that you didn’t choose a gift certificate because you couldn’t think of anything else – rather, you chose it so they can explore a certain interest more deeply.

“It’s personalizing the thing that seems almost impossible to personalize,” Bryan says.