Christmas gifts for children that aren't screens

There will be a screen on the Christmas list somewhere, and that is fine. This is not a list about taking things away. It is a list of things to put under the tree that will still be in use in March: presents that ask something of a child instead of doing it all for them, and that leave a little room for imagination to get in.

None of them is a brand. They are kinds of thing, and the right one for your child is whichever they would reach for on a wet Tuesday in February.

Things to read and write

A reading torch and a library card. The torch is for reading under the covers after lights out, which every child should do and most parents should pretend not to notice. Find one that clips to a book or stands on its own. The library card is the free half of the present: their own name on it, their own choices, and a whole building of things they have not read yet. Wrap the card. It matters that it arrives as a gift.

Post that keeps coming. A magazine subscription in their name is a present that arrives twelve times. The first issue goes under the tree, and the rest come through the door across the year, addressed to them, in among the grown-up post. A child who gets their own post stands differently at the doormat. Choose one about whatever they are obsessed with this year.

A letter from you, on Christmas morning. Tucked among the presents, an envelope with their name on it in your handwriting. Inside, one page: something you love about them, a memory from this year, a question for them to answer, and a P.S. It costs a stamp, and it is the thing they will keep. If you would like help with what to put in it, we wrote a guide: what to write in a letter to a child.

Things to make

A proper sketchbook and good pencils. Not a colouring book. A blank hardback with paper thick enough to take a wash of paint, and a tin of pencils better than the ones at school. The message is simple: you are an artist, and these are an artist’s things. Nothing else here produces as much, per pound, over a year.

A kit for something slow. A bread-making kit, a bird feeder to build, a model that takes a week of evenings, seeds for something that will not come up until April. The present is not really the thing. It is the afternoons spent making it, and the waiting.

A box of dull things. Our strangest suggestion, and in our experience the best. Take a large box and fill it with cardboard, string, tape, a torch, sheets of paper, old fabric and pegs, and nothing that comes with instructions. Label it with their name and the words “for building things”. Then stand back. The den, the shop, the spaceship and the puppet theatre will all come out of it, and not one of them was in the box.

Things to do together

A board game the family will actually play. Not the one with the licence and the plastic. The one you will get out on Boxing Day and again at half term, that takes forty minutes and has a rule everyone argues about. Pick a game slightly above their age rather than below it: being let into the grown-ups’ game is half the present.

A day out, written on a card. An afternoon at the climbing wall, a trip on a steam train, a night in a tent in the garden, a proper museum visit with lunch. Write it on a card, put a date on it, and wrap the card. Children like having something to look forward to almost as much as the thing itself, and a date on a card is a small promise kept.

A story that keeps arriving

Then there is the one we make. It belongs on this list for the same reason as the magazine and the letter: it comes through the door, with their name on it, long after Christmas is over.

A Journee story is told in letters. Each one is a chapter with your child as the hero and their family in the cast, written and drawn by our team and woven around your child, and a P.S. at the end asks them to choose what happens next. The next letter follows the road they chose. You can give it as a pack of letters or as a subscription; the details are at /pricing.

On Christmas Day itself, the thing to put under the tree is the gift card, at /gifting. The child has something to open on the day, and the first letter follows once the grown-ups have set up the story and picked the world. The family can be written in, so Grandma, the dog and a cousin in another country can all turn up in the chapters. And for a child who would rather listen than read, or who likes both, each letter has an audiobook version as an extra, read aloud by a narrator.

We would never say it is the only thing on the list. We would say it is the one still arriving in March, when the batteries in everything else have gone flat.

One rule for the whole list

Whatever you choose, choose the thing that asks something of them. A present that does everything is finished the moment it is unwrapped. A present a child has to do something with, whether that is building it, reading it, writing back to it or waiting for it, is still a present in the spring. That is the only Christmas rule we have.