The Single Best Gift For Families With Young Kids

There is, indeed, a perfect gift you can give a family with children. That gift is ice cream.

Last year, a friend gifted my family of four an all-out ice cream feast, via a delivery from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. As has long been established, ice cream is pretty much a perfect gift for anyone at any time—but I'm here to tell you it's an especially wonderful gift for a family with children. Here's why.

Blogs love to encourage people to gift experiences to families over things, and I cannot emphasize enough how much I cosign this advice. As the person who coordinates with Santa to put presents under the tree for Christmas morning, I can tell you, we have plenty of toys. Gifting experiences is, indeed, a kindness not just to the kids who get to enjoy the event, but to the parents who don't have to clean up that experience over and over, trying in vain to stuff it into an overflowing toy chest.

Frozen treats might not be terribly out of the ordinary for the average family, but a windfall of many different ice creams all at once probably is. When we got our Jeni's gift delivery, it was full of new flavors that none of us had tried before, and we got to each taste them together and share our thoughts, and quarrel over who got to finish the best ones. It was a feast for the ages, and it really broke from the norm in our house. Plus, in the midst of a season that's squarely focused on cookies and other baked goods, ice cream felt downright novel.

It's been said before, but we can go ahead and say it again: Everyone loves ice cream. It's rare, in my experience, for one gift to make the entire family happy, and it's a true delight for parents to get to enjoy a gift as much as the kids do (and vice versa). An ice cream delivery did that for my family, by letting us all indulge in a little whimsy at the exact same time.

Receiving this ice cream shipment changed the way I think about which gifts to buy for other families with kids. I ask myself: Is this going to make everyone in the family happy? Is it adding a little joy to their lives? Sometimes I brainstorm a gift idea, but the answer to at least one of those questions is "no." And when that happens, I go ahead and do what I should have done all along: I buy some ice cream instead.