Missionary Homecoming Gift Ideas That Are Not Another Frame
Almost every homecoming gift commemorates the mission from the outside. Very few of them ask him anything.
There is a standard set. A framed photograph of him in front of a landmark, a map with pins, a plaque with the dates, a scripture case with his name on it. They are all thoughtful and he will be genuinely glad to have them.
They also all have the same shape. Every one of them commemorates the mission from the outside, using what the family had access to, which is the photographs and the dates. None of them contain anything he knows and nobody else does.
The gift he is missing is not a record of where he was. It is a record of what happened to him there.
Gifts that ask him something
- A recorded conversation, done properly. Sit down with twenty specific questions and record the audio, not video. Audio is less self-conscious and his voice at twenty one is worth more than any photograph of him at twenty one.
- A letter book. Collect every email he sent home, printed and bound in order. You already have these sitting in an inbox and almost nobody thinks to do anything with them.
- The addresses, found. Track down the streets he lived on and the chapels he served in, printed properly. It takes an afternoon and it is startlingly moving.
- A written mission history. Not a scrapbook. The actual account, in his words, of the two years. This is the one that gets read in forty years, and the one almost nobody has.
Why the written version outlasts the rest
A framed photograph is looked at for a month and then becomes furniture. A book of his own account gets opened when he is engaged, when his first child is born, when a friend goes out, and when his own son is deciding. It is one of very few gifts that gets more valuable rather than less.
It is also the only one on this list that his children will care about. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the honest test for a gift meant to mark two years of somebody's life.
Gifts that suit the first month home specifically
The first few weeks back are stranger than most families expect. He has spent two years with every hour structured, and he arrives into a house where nobody tells him what to do next, into a peer group that has moved on, and into a lot of well meant questions he cannot answer in the time available.
Gifts that help in that specific window tend to be practical and unsentimental.
- Anything that gives him a reason to leave the house alone. A gym membership, a bike repair, a season pass. Solitude is genuinely difficult for the first month and having somewhere to go helps.
- Clothes that are not a suit. Frequently he owns almost nothing else that fits and he will not ask.
- A trip back, eventually. Not now. But saying out loud that the family intends to help him go back one day means a great deal on week two.
- Somebody to talk to who has done it. Arranging a lunch with a returned missionary ten years older is one of the most useful things a family can do, and it costs nothing.
What not to give
Two things worth avoiding, and both are given with real affection.
The first is anything that turns the mission into a finished chapter: a display case, a shadow box, a plaque with the dates on it, given in the first week. It is a lovely object and the timing tells him the thing is over and sealed. Give it in a year.
The second is anything that requires him to perform the mission for an audience. A homecoming slideshow he has to narrate, a scrapbook he has to explain page by page at a family gathering. He has four stories rehearsed for exactly that situation, and the more he is asked to perform them the more fixed they become, which is precisely what you do not want if you would like the real account eventually.
If you want something to actually hand him on the day
The awkward part of giving somebody a year-long project is that there is nothing to unwrap. That is solvable. A cover made by hand, engraved with his name, his mission and the dates, is a real object that arrives and gets opened. The book gets built over the following year and bolts into it, so the thing he opens on the day is the thing that ends up holding the finished account.
Covers are engraved solid wood at $129, leather at $149, and wood poured with resin at $189. Shipping is included, every one is made one at a time, and nothing is cut until you have approved a mockup.