Christmas Gift Ideas for Family Who Live Far Apart

Every Christmas list assumes you will be standing there when it gets opened. Take that away and most of the list goes with it. The jumper has to fit someone you have not seen since last year. The hamper has to arrive at a house you are not going to. The joke present needs the face it was bought for.

So this one starts from the brief instead of the products. Three conditions, all of them true when the family is spread out:

• You will not be in the room when it is opened.
• Anything physical has to clear the posting deadline, which in practice means ordering well before you feel ready to.
• The person most likely to be far away is often the one who says they do not need anything, and usually means it.

Ten ideas that hold up against all three, in an order that comes from the brief rather than from what we would like you to pick.

1. A message from everyone who cannot be at the table

It is first for one reason: it is the only gift on this list that puts the missing people in the room. Everyone who is not going to make it records a short message on their phone, and the family watches the lot of them together after the meal.

No posting deadline, nothing to fit, nothing to find space for. It also works in the direction people forget: not only a gift for the grandparents from the family, but a gift to the house that is hosting from the four people who could not get there.

What it asks of you is lead time rather than money. People need a few days to record, and the ones who care most are often the slowest, so ask earlier than feels necessary.

2. A video call with an actual plan

Free, and better than it sounds if someone runs it. The reason the Christmas call is usually flat is that nobody decided what happens on it, so eleven people take turns saying the connection is fine. Give it one piece of structure: the youngest reads something, or everyone answers the same question, or the person who moved away gets ten minutes and nobody talks over them.

3. A digital photo frame you load before you send it

Genuinely good for a grandparent, on one condition: the frame arrives already full. An empty one is a setup task you are not there to do. Load it, test it, then post it, and keep sending photos to it through the year, which is the part that makes it a distance gift rather than an object.

4. The year in a photo book

Twelve months of photographs that only exist on phones, printed and bound. Works best when it covers the family rather than the buyer: the house move, the new baby, the dog, the holiday nobody else went on. Order it early. This is the one on the list that is most often late.

5. Dinner sent to their table

A meal, a box from a bakery, the wine they would not buy themselves. It solves the distance problem by arriving on a date you choose, and it suits the relative who has run out of shelf space. Check the delivery window before the romance of the idea takes over.

6. A subscription that keeps turning up in February

Coffee, books, a magazine, flowers once a month. The advantage is the opposite of what gift guides usually claim for it: not that it is good value, but that distance makes January and February the lonely months, and this is a gift that is still arriving then.

7. Money towards the flight

Unromantic and frequently the right answer. If the reason you are buying a long-distance gift is that somebody cannot afford to travel, the gift is the travel. Say what it is for when you give it, otherwise it reads as cash and gets spent on the boiler.

8. A recorded reading for the grandchildren

A grandparent reads a book aloud, filmed once, kept for years. The direction is worth thinking about: the usual version has the grandparent recording for the children, and the version nobody does has the children reading to the grandparent who taught them. Both land, and neither needs posting.

9. Letters, collected rather than written

One letter is a nice thought. Fourteen, gathered quietly from the whole family and handed over in one envelope, is a different kind of object. The work is the collecting, and the reason it is ninth rather than first is that paper has to get to one address before it can get to the right one.

10. Something bought from a shop near them

The quiet trick for the posting deadline: buy locally to them instead of locally to you. A delivery from the bakery two streets away, a plant from the garden centre they like, paid for over the phone. No packaging, no tracking number, no January apology for a parcel that never came.

The one they will still be watching in March

Of these ten, nine are things that arrive. The first one is people, which is what the far-away family is actually short of, and it is the only one anybody rewatches.

If you want to do it this year: write down who is not going to be there, ask each of them for sixty seconds, give them a question rather than an instruction, and set your deadline a few days before the day itself. The clips arrive while you are doing something else, and the film is ready before the plates are cleared.