It is the morning of the birthday, or the 23rd of December, and you have nothing. Here is what research says about gifts bought in a hurry, and fifteen ideas that can still arrive today.
Leaving gifts late is normal. In its December 2025 survey, the National Retail Federation found that by early December American shoppers had, on average, finished only 51 percent of their holiday shopping. The NRF expected a record 158.9 million people to shop on "Super Saturday", the last Saturday before Christmas, up from 157.2 million the year before. Birthdays and anniversaries slip past people every day of the year for the same reasons: work, travel, a calendar reminder that went off at the wrong moment.
The good news is that the things recipients value most are rarely the things that take longest to buy. A gift can be fast and still feel considered, as long as it shows you were thinking about the person rather than the clock.
Economists have long suspected that many gifts miss. In a famous 1993 paper in the American Economic Review, Joel Waldfogel asked Yale students to value the holiday gifts they had received. On average they valued them at about 84 percent of what the givers paid, and gifts from close friends and partners did better than those from more distant relatives. The lesson is not that gifts are wasteful. It is that a gift chosen with knowledge of the person lands better than one chosen by price or category.
The default last-minute answer, a gift card, has its own problem. A Bankrate survey of 2,373 US adults in August 2024 found that 43 percent had at least one unused gift card, voucher or store credit, worth $244 on average. Gift cards are still the most popular fallback: the NRF found that 43 percent of holiday shoppers in 2025 planned to buy at least one. They are useful; they are just not memorable on their own.
Psychology adds a useful twist. Julian Givi and Jeff Galak, writing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2017, found that givers tend to pick safe gifts that match the recipient's stated preferences, while recipients often prefer sentimental ones, such as a photo of a shared moment. Givers avoid sentimental gifts because they fear getting them wrong. When you are short of time, a sentimental gift is often both quicker and better.
A digital gift can feel thin if it is only a link. Give it a moment. Print the first page or the confirmation and put it in an envelope. Write the card by hand. If you are together, read the first paragraph aloud. If you are apart, call when it arrives. The delivery method matters much less than the sense that you made an occasion of it.
If you are using Novellum, the gift option lets you add your own message, choose the day it arrives and tick a box so the recipient gets a card rather than a receipt. Cards are sent at 13:00 UTC, which is morning in the US and afternoon in the UK, so for an early start schedule it for the day before or forward the link yourself.
Sometimes the day has already passed. Say so plainly and skip the long excuse. "I missed your birthday, and I didn't want to send something rushed, so I made you this" is better than pretending. A late gift that is clearly personal does more for a friendship than an on-time gift that is not.
Facts checked on 13 October 2026.
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