Christmas Shopping For My Tween Has Been More Magical Than Ever

The influencer gift guides started early this year — I saw some hocking their Amazon storefronts for stocking stuffers back in October — and they all look virtually the same. Gift guides for him include bluetooth speakers and hoodies and fancy sneakers. Gift guides for her are full of coffee table books (please stop) and those little candle warmer lamps everybody has a swipe up link for. But nothing has enraged me more than the gift guides for tween girls. Clean beauty, slippers, ruffled socks — look, I’m sure some 10-year-old girls want those things. But the idea that that’s all anyone can think to gift one is so upsetting.

Because 10-year-old girls have personalities. They have opinions and interests and big ideas and dreams and feelings. They are stuck in that bittersweet stage of feeling big, but also feeling little. Of knowing change is coming and being both excited and nervous about it. Of never feeling quite right and then feeling 100% themselves.

And shopping for my tween this year has been the most magical Christmas shopping ever.

I can specifically remember it being hard to give her Christmas gifts when she was around 7 and 8. It always felt a little like I was just trying to figure her out. She used to love LEGO sets — do I buy her more? She’s getting into books — should I pick a series for her? She has opinions on outfits — is this the year I gift her cute sweaters? It felt like every three months she had a new interest and I was just trying to capitalize on it with gifts.

But at 10, my girl is my girl. She has hobbies now, and not just ones I’ve thrown at her to see if they’ll stick (like all of those never-completed sewing and crochet kits in her closet). She has definite ideas about her bedroom that hasn’t changed since she was 5. She wants to try new things and tells me she wants to spend less time on screens and more time creating. She gobbles up books, carries one with her everywhere she goes, has to be told to “please put the book down when you’re walking.” She loves music, making playlists to listen to while she showers (all by herself!) and is constantly playing games with me where she wants me to guess the millennial boy band within the first few seconds of her playing a song (I never lose). She loves a board game and still loves a stuffed animal.

And that’s why Christmas shopping for her this year has been so fun.

She asked for a ventriloquist dummy, roller skates, and mini LEGO sets. She wants one of those fuzzy terrycloth headbands to wear when she washes her face, and she also wants a new book of Mad Libs. She spends so much of her time drawing comics, so I ordered her a blank comic book to fill out, and then I threw a tumbler with her zodiac sign on it into my cart for her stocking. Her grandparents bought her new bedding after they heard she wants to redo her bedroom, and piano sheet music of Taylor Swift songs because they see her heart.

Her personality has exploded in the last year, and instead of thinking, “Oh I think she’ll like that” and then worrying she’ll toss it aside an hour later, I know exactly what will delight her for Christmas. It feels like shopping a bit for my own 10-year-old self — just a funny, smart, bookish weirdo of a kid who loves to go against the status quo. I can’t wait to help her write jokes for her own sets with her dummy.

Because this cusp of big and little, this cliff she’s standing on between elementary school and puberty? It’s not so scary. Here, she can still reach her skincare and a unicorn blanket. Here, she can ask me in the same breath for a crossbody bag and a stuffed baby koala. Here, she gets to fully embody what girlhood means to her — before someone tells her she’s too big to enjoy it or too little to understand it. She’s in the perfect sweet spot for Christmas — still keeping her heart wide open to faith and belief, while fully understanding what it means.

Here, Christmas — and Christmas shopping — is still magical.