Surprise gifts are always the best kind of gifts to give to a special person in your life. Providing the surprise gift is a welcomed one then there is always an enjoyment factor involved from the receiver. Present or gift buying it isn’t always the easiest thing to do when you’re looking to get an item for someone who has everything or gives away no clues into what they want as a present. Sometimes the most unexpected items can be the most treasured, not because they are particularly useful nor have much of a purpose, but because they have meaning and thought put into them.

An example of such gift is something I purchased for my son, Jack, a number of years ago. My son is now 12 years old, but at the time must have been no older than 7 or 8. Jack, like many young children was constantly striving to be as good as if not better than a lot of his classmates at various sports and other academic activities.

He would often have a good time kicking a ball around park fields with a few friends but was never the fastest, or the fittest, or the most technical, but obviously to me he was fantastic at any sport he played. A lot of Jack’s friends joined football teams, young rugby teams, tennis teams to name a few, but Jack wasn’t all that focussed on doing things in such an organised and structured way, he would much prefer to play without the rules or the pressures of being in a competitive team.

As most of Jack’s friends were now involved in sporting teams they would often come into school for Show and Tell with medals and trophies they has one from some of the tournaments they had been in. Obviously Jack was slightly envious and maybe even a little jealous of the trophies, medals and general success that his classmates were having. This process went on for a few weeks and was gradually eating away at him – he too wanted to win medals and trophies to prove how good he was, but he wasn’t part of a team and neither did he want to be. After a few weeks of his constant questions about how he could win at something and get a prize for it I decided to do something to give him something to smile about.

At the weekend, I stepped into an engraver shop, the kind that specialised in engraved gifts and personalised gifts and asked to get a modest sized trophy ‘cup’ with a few words engraved into it. The message I chose to get engraved might seem a little corny to some, but it definitely made my boy smile when he received it – "Life is not all about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce". When he received the gift and read the message he understood that there was more to doing well than a medal or a trophy.

Either way, he still got that trophy he was longing for and he still knows that he doesn’t need a medal to show that he’s winning.