The Zero Dollar Gift Guide
Wrapping up 2025 with zero wrapping required
It’s December, and it’s not just the presents that are getting wrapped.
Companies desperate for their own “Spotify moment” are undertaking the great wrapping. I’ve already had my YouTube Recap, which accurately captured how much my kids and I adored the 19th series of Taskmaster, but in no way reflected the many hours I’ve spent watching Stardew Valley videos with my daughter, as building a profitable farm became our new obsession this year. Soundcloud’s 2025 Playback told me just how many writing sessions were soundtracked with five hours in paradise with Floating Points. SNL cracked a joke on the overwhelming shame of seeing your Uber Eats wrapped; it turned out Uber had already built it, and revealed it two days later.
Even the business apps are at it. Raycast, a Mac productivity app, provided me with earth-shattering insights like the fact that I opened my clipboard history 973 times this year. If I get my head down, I might hit 1000 before the end of this essay. Granola, a note-taking app I use (and adore), sits in the background of my computer, turning itself on whenever it detects I’ve joined a meeting, and using AI to merge my notes with what it hears. For those like me who find themselves “memory challenged,” it’s a game-changer, and their end-of-year wrap-up claimed my most used phrase of 2025 was “Jump out of the plane and assemble the parachute on the way down,” which I’m sad to report is painfully accurate.
Rather than weaponising the terabytes of data these companies are amassing, we are witnessing the algorithms toying with us: scrapbooking what we watch, listen to, and talk about; sugarcoating surveillance into bite-sized snacks and packaging them up in aesthetically pleasing formats, perfect for sharing with your nearest and dearest. Roll the clock back a few years, and folks were apoplectic about the swarms of data that Google and Facebook were collecting. Now, we share these proof points with pride, markers of our unique and enviable taste.
Another end-of-year trend spreading faster than an influenza outbreak is the humble gift guide, an essential cog in the capitalist Christmas machine. The gift guide holds together an industry too big to fail; when publishers ruled the earth, it was a non-negotiable notch on the calendar, a chance to drive serious traffic and a hefty festive sack of affiliate money. With the arse having almost entirely fallen out of the advertising market for anyone whose name isn’t Google or Meta, publishers large and small have come to depend on the single-digit share that Amazon offers for sales referrals. Buzzfeed’s 2024 10-K (their annual report to the SEC, think of it as a Spotify Wrapped for how much money they no longer make) showed affiliate revenue bringing in $59.6m for the year, with approximately 30% of their entire earnings coming directly from Amazon’s deep affiliate pockets.
If my inbox is anything to go by, these economic headwinds have been trickling down to newsletter writers, who are looking to the gift guide as a potential revenue stream to offset declining reader income amid subscription fatigue. Some are genuinely helpful: The Kids Should See This has been publishing its guide longer than I’ve been writing this newsletter, and the 2025 edition is as good as ever. But it’s hard to vibe with some that have been rolling in over the last few weeks. Do I need yet another recommendation for a pair of Apple AirPod Pros?1 But what guide writer can resist recommending it, knowing that each sale will net them $7.47 in the new year, when Bezos’ bean-counting elves get back from their Christmas holidays. (Who are we kidding, as if they get time off.)
2025 has been a tough year for so many. Politics, war, and inflation that drove the price of everything up—apart from salaries. Another list with more ways to spend money felt a little off, so I jumped into the Dadscord and asked if folks had any good ideas for presents that cost nothing.
So, without further ado, and to wrap up the year, here’s our anti-gift guide.
9 presents for your kids that cost absolutely nothing but your time
Visit a Fire Station
There are very few ways my early years could be perceived as privileged, but as the son of a construction worker, I had constant access to a steady stream of heavy trucks and excavators. When my son was a toddler, his obsession was fire engines, and we’d regularly stop on the street to marvel at them when they were parked. We discovered a local fire station that offered “open days” on the weekends, where kids can come along, sit in the truck, and live their wildest fantasy. There’s probably one near you that does the same. Get a trip on the cards for January.
Create an Annual Pass to a Home Cinema Club
Earlier this year, I was explaining to the kids what life was like before Netflix. Every Friday night, a man used to come around in a black van with no windows and invite us to come inside. We’d walk up the stairs and be presented with a hundred-or-so VHS cassettes, with my mum telling me we could pick one for the week. It was to a six-year-old what the Criterion Closet is to a fully functioning adult.
Today, your kids don’t need to climb into a stranger’s van to watch a movie: thousands of them are a click away. Movie night has become a cherished Friday night ritual in our home—phones are placed far away, as we curl up on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn. If you wanted to take this to the next level, consider giving your kids an annual pass to your home cinema: one film a week, a hand-drawn poster, and a house rule that once the tickets are printed, there are no last-minute negotiations. Full disclosure: I stole this one wholesale from TikTok, from a lovely Irish lady called Kelly, who says, “It’s cheaper than going to a real cinema, and we don’t have to sneak around snacks in. To be totally honest, this is because I can’t bear us arguing over what film we’re going to watch every week.”
Make A Big Fat Christmas Quiz
Bring a bit of light entertainment to Christmas Day with an end-of-year quiz: Make it big, make it silly, and make sure there’s a round where the kids finally get to watch the adults panic. Five minutes of prep, maximum: a “guess the baby photo” round, a “guess the song intro” round, a “who said it this year” round, and one round that is purely you showing them a zoomed-in picture of something in your house and asking them what it is.
Plant An Acorn
What could be more poignant than watching a giant tree grow in the shadow of your own offspring? This likely only works if you own your house and plan to be there for a while (so it might stealthily be the most expensive item on the list). A lovely idea from Keith, who shared: “Pick an acorn, plant it together. Nurture it and watch it grow with them.”
Kick Off a Lifetime Love of Tabletop RPGs
Raise your kids right, and get them into tabletop gaming this Christmas. Eric shared, “This year I’m giving the kids a zine of a ttrpg I cobbled together called ‘Ninjas of Brooklyn’ based on a bedtime story we’ve been telling together for a few months. I kinda used the concepts behind Archipelago, then I introduced a game called Colour My Quest, which has served us well.”
Jon concurred, and had done something similar with his son: a free, printable RPG called RPage, which “worked really well with him playing and me guiding. For a very light alternative, we will often play with his knights and castles using dice-based turns—essentially, say what you want to happen, and if you roll more than 10 on a D20, you succeed.”
Start a Gratitude Jar
We started this practice last year: every week or so, when we sit down for dinner, we take small strips of paper and write what we were grateful for that week. It’s a deceptively simple practice that makes time feel visible and couldn’t be easier: keep a jar and a pen where everyone can reach them. On New Year’s Eve (or the first gloomy week of January when you need a serotonin hit), you empty the jar onto the table and read them out loud. It’s a homemade highlight reel.
Give Them Vouchers for a “Dad Date”
Your kids don’t need more stuff. Money is great, but they want the two resources even harder to come by: your time and undivided attention. So give it to them, with a monthly “dad date” voucher. Either pick out activities that you know they’d enjoy, or make it an open offer: “One morning together, once a month, and we do whatever you want.”
Plan an Urban Fruit Picking Trip
Falling Fruit is an excellent open-source mapping site for finding fruit trees near you. This site will tell you the type of fruit and tree, the yield, and what seasons are best to go picking. Dadscord dad Tom said he was mulling over “making a map of publicly accessible fruit trees in my local area … and styling it up to look like a treasure map and a quest to find the most types of fruit—I already know we have a kiwi tree, fig tree and passion fruit bush in our otherwise nondescript area.”
Check Your Rewards Cards
From Pete: “Check your REI co-op or other rewards balances. I had $18 in rewards that were about to expire. Free stocking stuffers ftw.” Also worth checking out are grocery store cards and any credit card schemes that might have a few thousand points stashed away, which could mean getting all kinds of perks for free. The digital equivalent of finding coins down the back of the sofa.
Get Free Museum and Gallery Tickets from the Library
Another one from Pete: “Our public library has free passes to local attractions like the science museum and nature centre. You reserve them in advance, and you’re good to go.” This sounded too good to be true, but after a bit of digging, it turns out to be a widespread practice across the US. In some locations, this is branded: New York residents can use their library cards to access a Culture Pass with free access to more than 100 locations in the city, and similar schemes exist in Seattle, Boston, and across California.
To find similar schemes near you, Google: your town/city + public library + museum pass and see what comes up. If that doesn’t work, go retro and call your local library. These programmes aren’t well-promoted, but your friendly neighbourhood librarian will be able to tell you what kinds of goodies your card can unlock.
Good Dadvice
An annual festive bumper pack.
That’s All Folks!
Thanks for reading The New Fatherhood this year. Your 2025 TNF Wrapped: this year, you received 31 issues of a so-called weekly newsletter, and if you’re reading this, you’re in the 1% of my favourite readers (don’t tell the rest of them).
Thank you to paid subscribers, who keep the lights on here and ensure the newsletter stays free and unpaywalled for everyone else, and to all the dads who have written a guest essay this year, keeping things rolling whilst I got the book over the line. And a very special thank you to the Dadscord crew, who continue to show up for each other in all kinds of wonderful ways, and make essays like this one possible: papa-powered, sleep-deprived and AI-free.
How did you like the newsletter today? How was TNF this year? Feel free to leave me a year-end review! I read all the notes you send, and they’re 100% anonymous, so be as brutally honest as you like.
Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad
Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals. Have a good one. See you in 2026.
You better believe that AirPod link was an affiliate one. You have to commit to the bit.
Love how the Stardew Valley hours got buried beneath the Taskmaster stats in the algrorithm's version of reality. That bit about us weaponizing our own surveillance data by sharing these recaps like badges of honor is spot on. We went from freaking out about Facebook tracking us to basically begging these companies to wrap up our data and put a bow on it so we can broadcast it. The Granola 'jump out of a plane' quote tho is gold tbh, captures something real about how we're all just constantly improvising thru everything.
Missed opportunity for the "real estate agent affiliate link" on the acorn suggestion.