An eightieth is usually one present from three generations at once, so it should be practical, easy to open and easy to use, and it should carry something of the year Dad was born rather than something new to learn.
By eighty the gift is rarely from one person. There are children, grandchildren and often great-grandchildren in the room, and somebody has been given the job of getting the present right on behalf of all of them.
That is a harder brief than it looks, and it is made much easier by dropping the idea that it has to be clever.
What was happening the year he was born
A dad turning 80 this year was born in 1946. Not a rounding: it is this year’s calendar in Brisbane minus 80, worked out when the page was built, so it is still right next year when everything else on a page like this has quietly gone stale.
- In Australia that year. Trans Australia Airlines flew its first service on 9 September 1946, a DC-3 from Laverton to Sydney.
- The car. There isn’t one. Australia had no locally designed mass-produced car until the Holden 48-215 arrived in November 1948.
- Number one. Rum and Coca-Cola, the Andrews Sisters, number one for two months from February. Kent Music Report, compiled retrospectively rather than published at the time.
- What a week’s work paid. The federal basic wage for adult men was 96 shillings a week, or four pounds sixteen.
Which puts his teenage years in the 1960s, and that is the more useful fact of the two. The picks below come from the sixties dad page rather than from an age bracket, because taste formed at fifteen is what a gift has to hit.
Practical beats clever, every time
The gifts that get used at eighty are the plain ones: the good blanket, the proper reading light, the radio that works with two buttons, the food he actually likes, the thing that makes an everyday task less annoying.
Clever presents at this age tend to be presents about the giver. They get admired once and put in the cupboard, and everybody involved knows it.
Check the packaging before you check the price
This is the practical detail nobody writes down. A present that cannot be opened without scissors and good grip is a present opened by somebody else, in front of everybody, which is a small indignity on his own birthday.
The same goes for anything with tiny print, fiddly catches, or a set-up process. If it needs a phone to work, somebody in the family is now permanent technical support for it.
What not to buy for an 80th
A novelty walking stick, or anything else that jokes about being old to a man who is dealing with it daily.
Anything that has to be charged before use and then again every week. Fiddly assembly. And a gift card, which at eighty is a request that he go shopping.
The year Dad was born is the best material you have
This is the birthday where the past is genuinely the point. He can tell you what was on the wireless, what the car was, and what things cost, and most of the family has never asked.
The block above sets out what was actually happening in Australia the year he was born, from named sources rather than a template. It is also the best conversation you will have at the party.
