A Christmas Gift Idea

Hallmark sells a variety of recordable storybooks in their stores.  While these seem like corny gifts and Hallmark's selection is seriously sentimental, they're actually pretty great.

My sister sent one to my son two years ago - it was her and my nephew reading The Night Before Christmas.  In the opening message my nephew talked about how much fun he had with us that past summer and how awesome his cousin was.  My son was only a year old, so he didn't really care, but I teared up and told everybody about it.  It was a wonderful way to have my family with us at Christmas when we're so far away.  Last year she sent another Christmas book for The Kid as well as one from my mother reading Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney.  My mom has been fighting cancer off and on for eight years and she was very sick that past two summers that we were home.  I bawled.  It was such a wonderful gift for my son and for me.

The books are pretty thick due to the recording mechanism, but they all seem to come in a uniform size.  My sister said the recording was fairly easy, but you have a limited amount of time to read each page.  My sister had to practice with my nephew so he could read everything in the allotted time.  Being six, he felt a bit of pressure and read so quickly he was breathless.  You do have an opportunity to record over each attempt, so it's ok to practice some.  There's also a switch to turn off the recording feature to protect the message from accidental erasures.  Even though I know my son can't record over the message, I keep these books out of his reach for right now.  I would be heart broken if anything happened to them.

I would highly recommend these gifts for family that lives far away or for grandparents in general.

You can see Hallmark's list of Recordable Storybooks HERE, but at the time of this writing they didn't have their Christmas books listed yet.  I also recommend watching the short See How They Work video at the bottom of the screen.  (The recording is really that clear and loud.)