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The Year We Stopped Buying Dad Stuff
Published 5/24/26
Open the cabinet above our coffee maker, and you'll find an archaeological
dig site of Father's Days past.
A few versions of "World's Best Dad" mugs. One of them chipped or glued back together.
A coaster set that has been used exactly zero times. Behind the mugs, a bottle of cologne
I bought him five years ago, that I have never once seen him use. A "personalized" cutting board with his initials
in a font I now find slightly tragic. A 14-piece grilling utensil set, still in the original cardboard sleeve.
It's a graveyard of things I’m scared to get rid of.
And I’m sure it’s not unique to my house. I assume women everywhere have some similar unmentionable cabinet just like this.
A quiet monument to a decade of Father's Day gifting that nobody really wanted, nobody really used, and nobody ever felt great about handing over.
So a few years ago, I just stopped.
The Father's Day Gifting Industrial Complex
There's something deeply strange about Father's Day gifting, and I think we should probably name it. Every June, we're presented with the same five categories of gifts, dressed in slightly different packaging. The mug, the tie, the grilling tools, the cologne, the socks.
And every June, we line up to participate. We buy, wrap, and hand it over. He says thanks, smiles, and that's that. The mug joins the cabinet, and we do it all again next year.
It's a sad little system when you really sit with it. Not because the gifts are bad (though, often, the gifts are bad,) but because nothing about the ritual actually says anything to him.
What Are We Even Trying to Say?
Here's what I think is going on.
When you buy your husband a Father's Day mug, you are not saying, “Here is something you wanted.” You are saying, “I am acknowledging that today is Father's Day and I am performing the cultural ritual of acquiring an object on its behalf.”
He knows this, you know this, and the mug knows this. What we're actually trying to say is something more like: “I see you and you showing up. You're a good dad. You're our dad! We notice, and we love you!”
But somewhere along the way, the cultural script for saying that to a man on Father's Day got handed over to a buying decision in the gift aisle at the big box store, and we've been faithfully executing it ever since. I think the problem is that men, broadly, don't really want stuff. I think what they want is to be seen.
The Year We Stopped
A few years ago, I was scrolling through my camera roll looking for a specific photo, and I got stuck. There he was at the school for the kindergarten graduation. There he was on the floor with the baby. There he was hiking with the baby strapped to him. There he was asleep on the couch with a kid splayed across his chest. There he was in the garden with the kids following him. There he was, and there he was, and there he was, in thousands of photos he had never seen.
This realization came the day after I had been at the store, looking for the mugs. And the feeling came over me that I didn’t want to buy him just another thing for Father's Day. Instead, I gathered up a year of those photos, the ones he didn't know I'd taken, the ones I'd sent to our moms, the ones he'd never seen because he was the one in them and they were on my phone. And I made him a book of them.
He opened it on Father's Day morning in bed and went quiet. He flipped through it for a long time. And then he said the thing I'll never forget:
"I didn't know you saw all this."
What Actually Changed
Here's what I figured out that year. He didn't need a mug, socks, or cologne. He needed evidence.
Evidence of the mornings making pancakes. The hours I noticed him in the garden. That missing work for a graduation meant something. That his life as a dad, which sometimes might feel mostly small, mostly unphotographed to him, mostly happening while he's too in-the-middle-of-it to document, had a witness.
He had me. A witness, a photographer, a narrator of the household, and a memory keeper. He just didn't have the proof. But the book gave him the proof. Now, every Father's Day, he gets the same thing: a record of the year he just lived, from the only angle he can't see it from: mine.
The Cabinet Is Still There
We didn't get rid of the mugs. They're still up there, holding the chipped histories of Father's Days past. I keep them as a reminder of what we used to do because we didn't know what else to do. But now we know.
The thing every dad actually wants for Father's Day isn't on the shelf at the big box store. It's on your phone, right now, in the 4,000 photos he has never seen.
You're already taking the photos. You're already the historian, and you already have everything you need. You just have to give it to him!
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