You Need Unique?

Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy - "You Need Unique?"

Christmas is just a few weeks away and you want to give your child the perfect gift, right? Not just something "hard to find" but actually "one of a kind."  Not just "limited edition" but really "nowhere else on Earth." You want to give him or her something truly unique.

So how do you do that?

Is it like the old joke, "How do you catch a unique rabbit?" Well, you 'neak up on it, of course!

That may work for unique rabbits, but for unique presents there is really only one sure-fire way to go. It’s not in a store. It’s not online. You have to make something yourself.

Now don’t worry if you are not particularly good with arts and crafts. There are all sorts of ways that you can create something special for your kids. Homemade presents can include writing, painting, music, building, baking, photography, video, and more. Really the only important thing is that is it something made personally by you, specifically for your child.

Below are three examples of unique presents we have made for our kids over the years: "Paint a Door", "Draw a Picture", and "Make a Book." Some of these can take some time, so if it ends up being too late for this Christmas, then you can work on these for upcoming birthdays as well.

Paint a Door

When my oldest son turned 9 years old, we wanted to do something special for his birthday. Well, our family is crazy about Doctor Who. I have been watching the show since I was a kid, when Tom Baker was the Doctor with his long scarf. Now all four of our kids are fanatics. So Carmen and I decided to turn Carter's bedroom door into a TARDIS, which is the "spaceship" Doctor Who uses to travel through time and space.

So the first question might be, how did we manage to paint his door without him knowing about it. Well a couple months earlier Carter and his friends were teasing Mason (our middle son) and ran away from Mason and slammed the bedroom door to keep him out. In our house we have the famous rule "You abuse it... you lose it." This applies to throwing toys, leaving things out in the yard, or in this case slamming a door on your younger brother. So, I took the door off the hinges and stored it down in the basement.

After a few weeks we were going to put the door back up for him, when we came up with the plan to make it into his birthday present. So, over the course of a couple weeks, we would sneak down to the basement after the boys went to sleep and worked on transforming the door into the TARDIS (see picture above).

On his birthday we secretly reattached the repainted door to his door frame while he was busy with other presents downstairs. We then told him that we had one more present for him, but that it was upstairs in his room. He and his brothers absolutely loved it!

Of course, if you don’t want to paint an actual door in your house, you can just pick up a used one from the Re-Store to paint and swap it with your original door.

Draw a Picture

Another pretty geeky present I made was for my daughter’s 15th birthday. I have always loved video games from the time I was little and playing my Atari 2600. As a good and loving father I did my best to raise (or "influence" or "brainwash") my daughter to love video games as well.

One of our all time favorites was the online fantasy role-playing game "World of Warcraft". We spent days (ok weeks … lots and lots of weeks) exploring the world of Azeroth, fighting monsters, finding treasures, and forgetting to sleep. Out of all the characters, Chrissee most loved to play the game as a night elf, a majestic and fierce race of creatures living in a magical, beautiful world.

So for her 15th birthday I decided to make a picture of her as her night elf character. Here’s how I did it:

• First I found a large recent picture (I used her school portrait).
• Then I put tracing paper on top of it and a light behind it and traced the general outline of her face (you can just press the photo against a window on a sunny day).
• Next I used a black marker to darken the lines I had traced, so it looked a lot like a coloring book page.
• Then I scanned the black-line drawing into my computer.
• At this point I used a graphics program (like Photoshop) to color the image so she looked like a night elf, put in a background I got from the video game, and add in some text.
• Finally I printed out the finished color picture and mounted it in nice frame (see picture above).

She loved the picture and hung it on her bedroom wall, where she could look at it during those rare moments when she actually pulled herself away from "World of Warcraft" to get some sleep.

Make a Book

Another present for my daughter came one year later and came out of her love of writing. As a teenager, she wrote lots and lots of poetry (a legal requirement for all girls). I always thought her writings were good, but her most powerful works were written during the year or so right before, during, and after her mother and I went through our divorce. This was understandably a very difficult time for my daughter and she poured out her feelings in verse.

Through her poems I could see her make the journey from sadness to anger to hope to healing. I wanted to capture the beauty and honesty of these expressions in something more permanent than the notebook pages she filled. So I decided to turn them into a book.  Here’s how:

• First I got all her poems into a Word document.
• Next I chose a title for the book, "Dangerous Moonlight," taken from one of my personal favorite poems in the batch, and found a neat picture to match for the cover (see picture above).
• Then I arranged the poems by theme and broke them up into four main sections, each for a different phase of the moon.
• I finished off the book by writing a forward with a special note to her.

At that point I used an online publishing service called Lulu (www.lulu.com) to turn the document into a real printed book. Through Lulu you simply upload your document, make a few choices about the paper and binding, choose how many you want, and they professionally create your books for a pretty reasonable cost.

I ended up ordering about 20 copies for Chrissee so she could have one for herself, but could also give them out to friends and family like a real "book signing" event. If you are curious and want your own copy, you can still order her book through Lulu. I keep my copy in my study as one of my most prized possessions. The book may have been a gift for my daughter, but it was also a gift for me, capturing on paper a snapshot of her life.

So how about you? Share in the comments what unique gift you have made for your kids, or maybe that you received from you parents.