Aunties, uncles, godparents and grandparents who live abroad buy gifts under a specific handicap. You are not in the house, so you do not know what the child already owns. You are working from photographs and a birthday reminder. And whatever you choose has to survive a courier. So you end up buying clothes in the wrong size, or a toy that turns out to be the fourth of its kind, or you send money and feel slightly like you have opted out. What gets kept, and what does not Ask a parent which gifts from five years ago are still in the house and the answer is rarely the expensive one. Toys leave. Clothes are outgrown within a season, and the ones bought from abroad are often outgrown before they arrive. What tends to stay is anything with the child's name on it, and anything that turns into a story the family retells. That is a useful filter, and it has nothing to do with how much you spend. It sorts on one thing: whether the object is specifically theirs. Four questions worth asking before you buy Will it still make sense in a year? A gift for a three-year-old that is meaningless at five is a gift with a very short life. Does it carry their name, or their face, or their family? Personal beats expensive, reliably. Does it connect them to where they are from, or only to where they live? For a diaspora child this is the gap nobody else in their week is filling. Is it one more thing in a full house? Parents of small children are quietly drowning in objects. Something flat, and read at bedtime, is a kindness. On naming ceremonies and christenings These are the occasions where the usual gift logic breaks down completely, because the baby cannot use anything and will not remember it. The gift is really for the parents now and for the child in about six years. Which argues for something kept rather than something used. Traditionally that meant silver or a bible. A book with the child's name in it works on the same principle and gets opened more often. If you genuinely do not know what to get Ask the parent one question rather than five: what does the child talk about at the moment? Not what do they need, which produces a polite answer about nothing. What are they obsessed with. Bridges, animals, being brave, a particular cousin. That single answer narrows a gift better than a wish list. What we make, since you are here Gli Books makes personalised picture books in which the child is the illustrated hero — their face, their hair, their name on the cover — in a story set in a real Ghanaian place. You upload one photograph and see two finished pages before you pay anything. It happens to answer all four questions above, which is not an accident; those questions are roughly why we started. We ship to Ghana, the UK, the US and Canada, and checkout shows the current delivery estimate before you pay.