Gifts for the Person With No Hobbies

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Gift ideas for the person on your list who’s always playing hard to get (a gift for).

My dad is, BY FAR, the hardest person to shop for. It’s not that he’s picky or unnecessarily critical of gifts. It’s that he doesn’t have ANY hobbies.

Dad likes pizza. He likes the dog ok. He’s very frugal (“Frugal Fogle” is his nickname). He likes watching movies and enjoys going out to lunch. But when it comes to gifts? He will tell you flat out that he doesn’t want anything.

And in our materialistic world… one where there are a million things that I am personally still aspiring to afford or obtain in some way…that mentality can cause me to draw a complete blank on what to get this guy for Christmas.

Believe me. We have taken his interests to the creative limits we can think of. Dad likes pizza? Ok, let’s get him a book on the best places to get pizza when he travels (which is still rare; the irony is that Dad isn’t really trying to find “the best pizza”… he’s just looking for the closest copy to this crappy pizza place from Wisconsin, and he can only carry so many in his luggage back to Atlanta). Dad likes movies? Let’s get him DVDs (a former default option, now pretty much made obsolete by Netflix and other such services). Dad likes hanging out with us? Ok, let’s buy him a pizza-making class with us.

The thing is, I believe Dad when he says he doesn’t think he needs anything. And I’m not going to really get into the whole lets-just-appreciate-what-we-have angle, because yes, that’s absolutely the better way of thinking. Full acknowledgement that I’m here living in a material world with a fake crisis.

But Christmas isn’t just about what a person needs. After all, it’s the thought that counts, right? And the whole family deals with this long, drawn-out process every year trying to come up with something. People with hobbies are so much easier, right??

So, I recruited some help to make a list of items that people don’t know they want. Things for people who have no true hobbies. Things that you can still hand them on Christmas day and can show them you appreciate their minimalism. Or, things that will make them feel like the money meant for them was well spent on something that matters. Or, gifts that they’ll get so excited about, you can call them a dirty liar for being just as superficial as the rest of us. ?