Six Ways to Give Someone a Round Tuit

I won’t try to deny it—I do like shopping. I like sales. I like giving presents. It’s fun! And yet, one of the best presents I’ve ever heard of was in a story I heard on a radio show years ago. The woman said that her husband had gathered up all of her watches and had the batteries replaced in them.

It’s one of those things that seems so simple, and yet, it’s also one of those things that you might never get around to. The elusive “round tuit” nobody ever seems to get. Sometimes they’re free; sometimes they cost just a bit. But they almost always mean a lot more.

I asked the other GeekMoms what sorts of things they’d like for Christmas. Here’s what they said. Feel free to use them for your own gifts, or get inspired to give someone in your family just the right round tuit.

• You could steal the watch battery idea. But here in 2015, it might be less likely that your beloved has a rotating collection of watches. Perhaps instead you set up a charging station for your family’s phones and smartwatches. You could get an inductive charger if your devices can use it. Just think about how many fewer times you’ll hear, “Where is my phone?!”
• I am really good at having photos printed. I am terrible about getting them on the wall. Yesterday I finally hung large prints I had bought a year and a day earlier! If you’ve got a growing digital archive, print the highlights into an actual, corrupted-drive-proof photo album for your family. Frame some and hang them on the wall.
• Several of us mentioned closets, specifically for someone to organize them! You probably shouldn’t get rid of any of your spouse’s clothes without asking first, but a closet where you can actually find the thing you want would be a Christmas miracle for a lot of us. There are plenty of other things to organize as well, from comic book collections to bookshelves.
• Clean the thing that never gets cleaned. For one GeekMom, it’s the upstairs bathroom. Maybe in your house, it’s the basement or the craft room. For one GeekMom, it would be sorting the mail that has piled up. Two agreed that a deep cleaning of the carpets would make their days.
• Fix the thing that never gets fixed. Especially if it’s something the “recipient” knows how to fix and never does. (If it’s the thing that only you know how to fix, you’re really just finally doing what you should have done!) It might even be as simple as making all the bulbs in the light fixture match. Fix the leaky faucets. Get the tires rotated and the alignment checked.
• Give your spouse “a day off” and solve all the problems. One GeekMom wrote, “I would just love one day when I didn’t have to solve any crisis, minor or major variety.” That means everything—so start figuring out what’s for dinner.