Christmas gifts for grandparents from the grandkids

The Christmas gifts grandparents keep are the ones with the grandkids in them: something the kids made, a photo gift done well, their voices on a recording, or a promise of time together. Most grandparents have enough things. A drawing with a date on the back, a photo book of the year, or a story book starring the grandkids ends up on the fridge or the shelf for years. Here are ideas at every budget, starting with free.

My own kids are three and one, and the thing I noticed when I made the first coloring storybook with them in it was how fast the grandparents asked for a copy. That tells you most of what you need to know about this list.

Free and nearly free (things the kids make)

These cost paper, paint and an afternoon. They are also the ones grandparents talk about.

• Handprint or footprint ornament. Salt dough (flour, salt, water), pressed with a hand, baked low until dry, painted, with the child's name and the year. For a baby, a footprint on card stock works and is less of a wrestle.
• A framed scribble. Pick one drawing, write the child's name, age and what they said it was on the back, and put it in a cheap frame. A toddler's "this is you, Grandpa" is worth more than most store gifts.
• A recorded story. Film the kids reading or "reading" a favorite book, or singing one carol badly. Send the file, or put it on a cheap USB stick with the label written by the kids.
• A coupon book of time. "One afternoon of helping in the garden", "one sleepover", "one video call where I show you my room". For grandparents nearby, this is often the most used gift on the list.
• A homemade coloring page of the family. Turn a holiday photo into line art and let the kids color it in. Our guide shows how to turn a photo into a coloring page for free. A colored version for Grandma and a blank copy so she can color it with them at the next visit is a nice pair.

Under about $30

• A small photo book of the year. App-based photo book services make this a ten-minute job from a phone. Chatbooks, for example, describes itself as letting you customize and order books from its app in less than 5 minutes. Pick 20 photos, add one line per page in the kids' words.
• A calendar with the grandkids' art. Scan twelve drawings, one per month, and print a calendar at a photo shop or online. Birthdays already filled in.
• A personalized coloring storybook. If you want the grandkids to be the heroes of a story, Colorkin makes a printable storybook from your family photos for $29, drafted with AI illustration tools and checked page by page by a person, and you can include the grandparents in it. A printed keepsake is $59, and extra printed copies for other grandparents are $19. A homemade coloring book from your own photos does a similar job for free; see how to make a coloring book from photos.
• Seeds or a plant the kids pot and decorate. Painted pot, a plant that is hard to kill, and a label in the kids' handwriting.

Splurge gifts that keep giving

• A story-collecting subscription. Storyworth sends your loved one weekly questions and turns the answers into a keepsake book at the end of the year; its site listed it starting at $69 when we checked. It flips the usual direction: this is the grandparents' story, for the grandkids to keep. Grandkids can help by choosing the questions ("What did you get for Christmas when you were my age?").
• A Wi-Fi photo frame the family can add to. Several brands sell digital frames that family members can load from their phones, so new photos keep arriving all year. Set it up with a starting batch before you wrap it, especially for grandparents who are not into apps.
• A trip or an experience together. Tickets to a holiday show, a train ride, a museum day. The gift is the date on the calendar.

For long-distance grandparents

Distance changes what works. A big box on December 25 is lovely, but a small thing every month does more for the relationship.

• A drawing in the mail each month. Pre-address and stamp twelve envelopes and give them as the "gift". The kids fill one each month.
• A standing story-time call. Give the grandparents a copy of a picture book and keep a matching copy at home, then read it together on a video call. Two copies of the same book is a cheap, real gift.
• A photo frame or shared album that you keep updating.

We go deeper on this in gifts and ideas for long-distance grandparents, and the year-round version of this list is gifts for grandparents from grandkids.

Mailing it in time

If any of this has to travel, mail early. USPS publishes its recommended holiday shipping dates on its holiday shipping page each year, and the safe habit is to have packages out in the first week of December, earlier for anything going overseas or to a military address. Digital gifts (a video file, a printable book, a photo frame you set up remotely) are the fallback for the last week.

A note on making it about the kids

The pattern behind every idea above is the same. Pediatric advice on welcoming a new baby suggests asking family to spend time with the older child so they feel included, and the same instinct works at Christmas in reverse: grandparents want to feel included in the kids' lives. Anything that brings them closer to the everyday, a drawing, a voice, a story, a visit, beats anything bought for them from a store.

More gift guides for every age and occasion are on our gift ideas page.

Questions parents ask