Confirmation Gifts for a Godson

Boys of confirmation age are harder to buy for, and everyone knows it. He will be polite about whatever he opens, which is exactly the problem — you will not find out whether you got it right.

Here is how to improve the odds.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Buying something devotional that he will find embarrassing to own.

A fourteen-year-old boy is intensely aware of how things look to his friends. A gift that is obviously, unmistakably religious — the kind of thing that has to be explained if someone picks it up in his room — will be thanked for and then put away.

This is not a failure of faith. It is being fourteen.

The gifts that work are either useful enough to earn their place, or private enough that nobody else sees them.

Useful enough to earn its place

The Cross Stoneware Coffee Mug is the best example in this catalogue. Fourteen ounces of stoneware, used most days, and it makes no statement to anyone who is not looking for one. It will also outlive most of what he receives that year.

The kind of gift that becomes his by use rather than by ceremony.

Private enough that nobody else sees it

The Handy Brown journal is faux leather, five by seven inches, and fits in a bag or a bedside drawer. The Be Strong wirebound journal in black and grey is the plainer version — from the outside it is simply a notebook.

Boys that age are far more likely to write than to say, and far more likely to write in something nobody would think to open.

If he reads

Come Close is written for that age rather than adapted down to it, which is the whole difference between a book that gets read and one that gets shelved.

One-Minute Devotions in blue faux leather is the shorter-format option — a minute is a length of time he will actually give it, where twenty minutes is not.

The traditional gift

If you are his godfather or sponsor and you want to give the thing that gets kept, the ESV Journaling Bible in Good Shepherd is the one. Wide margins, meant to be written in, in a cover that will not look dated in ten years.

Give it if he does not already own an adult Bible. That is the only real condition.

What to write

Short. Genuinely — four or five lines.

Boys that age do not read long cards from relatives, and a long card mostly serves the person writing it.

Say one thing you have noticed about him that is true and specific and not about sport. Say you are around if he ever wants to talk, and mean it, because at some point in the next five years he may want to and will need to already know the offer stands.

Then stop. The brevity is part of the message: you are talking to him as a person, not delivering a lesson.

Ordering

Confirmation Sunday does not move. A week’s lead time is enough for anything unengraved.