$50 Christmas Gift

dewey02 wrote:
What do you know about him and his RV?
There are many small items that are useful, but he may have some of them.

A gift card, in my opinion, is a lousy gift.
While he can buy whatever he wants, a gift card also says "I put no thought or effort into this gift. I don't really care about knowing anything about you or putting any effort whatsoever into finding out what you may like."

You can just google RV Christmas gifts under $50 and you will get lots of hits.
But the key to any gift giving is to know the person, what they like, what they need that they might not necessarily buy for themselves.

While I agree to your last sentence, I disagree with the rest.

As we get older, the amount of things "we need but might not buy for ourselves" are fewer and, quite often, more expensive than these gift limits allow. For example, those Anderson levelers. While most people with RVs would be happy to get them (because they are more expensive than many people are willing to spend on levelers), they are also more expensive than the limit. Most gifts under $50 are not things a person "needs but they wouldn't buy themselves". If it's under $50, then you're lucky if it's something they haven't yet bought themselves.

Buying off a "gift guide" is NOT putting thought into a gift. It's putting someone else's idea of a good gift into action (and usually that person is a marketer). I can tell you that there hasn't been a gift guide in over 10 years that contains anything I would consider a gift worth receiving - including ones for RVs.

I would far rather receive a generic gift card than anything else. I would be able to buy that one item I've been eyeing quietly. A gift card for CampingWorld would be useless to me - I have everything I could possibly want to buy from a CampingWorld (and I most likely paid less for it). A gas card would be good - as long as it's for a station that I actually have nearby (I don't want to have to drive 20 miles in the wrong direction to get gas before a trip).

If you're going to go for a gift rather than a gift card, then find something that isn't "on the shelf". For instance, how about asking the wife for photos of their vacations with the RV? Then put those photos in a digital frame.