If you have teenagers to buy for this Christmas, it can be tricky to know what to get for them. I have high-school-aged nieces and nephews in my family, which helps me keep my finger on the pulse of the kinds of gifts that youngsters would love to receive.
I always support the Benjamin Foundation’s Christmas gift appeal each year and enjoy choosing suitable gifts for the teenagers they care for, who might not otherwise receive a gift at Christmas. I like to keep an eye out for gifts for them throughout the year and these are some of my top picks for festive gifting.
Enhance their education
A good idea when searching for festive gifts for teenagers is to find out what they enjoy studying at school – particularly if they have already chosen their GCSE courses. This gives you an insight into their likes and you can even help them to succeed in their subject with the gift you choose.
For example, if a young person has chosen to study art, photography or design technology, you can enhance their learning by choosing some equipment, such as a digital camera. A piece of tech like this will help them with their school coursework and will perhaps encourage them to follow their hobby outside of school, too.
The affordable Kodak PixPro C1 certainly has a design that they will be happy to be seen with; it has a retro-inspired case and comes in three colourways to suit their style. It’s compact enough to fit into a pocket but is powerful enough to take HD videos and 13MP photographs – which are ideal for including in their art or design sketchbooks.
An added bonus is that it’s rechargeable, so there are no ongoing costs of buying batteries, and the screen flips up to enable them to take selfies – making it the ultimate camera for taking on days out with their friends.
Another similar idea for kids who are studying music for their GCSE or who play an instrument or are in the school choir is a speaker and microphone combo. It’s a great way to encourage them to take their singing and performance skills to the next level and, if you choose a kit like this Karaoke Station below, it’ll get their friends involved too, which always makes it more fun!
This gift is a great price but is packed with features, including colour-changing LED disco lights, two wireless microphones, fun voice-changing filters and the ability to stream music playlists or support for music stored on a microSD memory card.
It’s a brilliant way to turn any living room into a mini stage so that your teens can practice their singing and music performance skills over the holidays, ready to take their newfound confidence and joy for singing back into the music classroom in January, ready for their GCSE years.
Fun for downtime
It’s not all about school, even when they’re studying for their exams, so consider getting your teenager something fun or just really cute to enjoy in the evenings and weekends.
I’ve mentioned previously in my gift guide for kids that I love checking out the seasonal collections at the Natural History Museum online shop and while I was browsing the site this year, I found a plethora of gifts that I know my teenage nephew would love – all dinosaur themed!
There’s Lego, Top Trumps and Jurassic World-themed gifts galore, but the one I chose is Monopoly Dinosaurs. This is a more grown-up game option and follows the idea of traditional Monopoly, but the game players are scientists and palaeontologists collecting fossils and claiming excavation sites or science labs – so much fun!
If your teen isn’t into fearsome dinosaurs, then cuteness is probably the order of the day. And I defy any child of any age (or any adult, for that matter!) to not want to hug this gorgeous Warmies Sloth. It has beautiful marshmallow coloured fur – the softest thing you’ve ever touched, which makes it so appealing.
Plus, who can resist that adorable face? And this sloth is the cutest mini size. To top it all off, like every toy from the affordable Warmies Minis range, it can be heated in the microwave to provide soothing warmth and a relaxing lavender scent – perfect for drifting off to sleep at bedtime; something many teens find hard to do.
Investigate their interests
I know it can be tricky to get teenagers to open up about their interests but if you can manage to spark up a conversation about what they love to do at the weekends, that could help you to pinpoint some relevant gifts that’ll help them to make their most of their hobbies.
They might have started experimenting with their hair or personal style this year so the Studio Creator Hollywood Mirror gives makeup lovers and beauty beginners the ultimate desk-top setup for flawless lighting and effortless organisation. It was always a dream of mine to have a Hollywood mirror as a teen and now I finally have one as an adult, but I would have loved to receive this when I was young.
The mirror is freestanding with three lighting modes and the touchscreen offers adjustable brightness. Plus, if your youngster is a fan of the popular GRWM (Get Ready With Me) videos and tutorials online, they can use the 360° phone holder while they copy-along a make-up look or hairstyle.
Perhaps your teenager is really into food – both cooking and eating. If so, you can support their love of a good meal by gifting them a handy recipe book. But make it a fun one with colourful illustrations and step-by-step methods to make their own takeaway-style food from around the world. Tacos and pizza, anyone?
This book not only encourages teens to make and eat the food they love from scratch (rather than buying the less-healthy takeaway version), it also provides them with life skills. So many youngsters head off to university not knowing how to cook, so why not take this opportunity to encourage their interest in food and help them to understand basic cooking techniques and how meals are constructed? Their future-selves will thank you for it!
There are cooking, baking, vegetarian and world cuisine options in the Kids Can Cook collection of books, so you can give them one book for each birthday and special occasion, starting this Christmas – or you can gift them all the books as a bundle to create a larger present to unwrap on the big day.
I hope this gift guide has given you some inspiration for buying Christmas presents for teenagers this year. Please let me know in the comments below what gift you think a teen would love to receive for Christmas. And be sure to check out my festive gift guide for younger children here, too!
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Some items in this blog post have been gifted to me and the pink links indicate a gifted product, affiliate link or information source. All thoughts and opinions in this post are based on my own experience and I am not responsible for your experience 🙂
