CUSTOM CHRISTMAS GIFTS MADE FROM YOUR PHOTO

By the third or fourth present of the morning, everyone in the room has stopped being surprised. The candle is nice. The socks are useful. The gift card is honest about itself. None of them get looked at twice.

A pillow with somebody's face on it interrupts that rhythm, because nobody in the room has seen it before and nobody can work out where it came from. It is the only kind of present left that cannot be duplicated by accident by another relative, cannot be guessed from the shape of the box, and cannot be quietly returned in January.

Custom Christmas gifts work for a boring structural reason. Most of what sits under a tree is a manufactured object that thousands of other people also received. A photograph of one specific dog, or one specific grandmother, exists once.

The two reactions you are choosing between

There are really two Christmas gifts here wearing the same coat. The sincere one is a photograph of a person or animal somebody loves and misses, which lands quietly and gets kept for years. The ridiculous one is a life size printed face of your brother, which lands loudly and gets filmed.

Both work. They are just aimed at different people, and it is worth deciding which one you are buying before you pick the photo.

Most personalised gift sites put a countdown banner on the page in November and leave it there. Here is the actual arithmetic instead, so you can decide for yourself.

Production takes three days, counted from the moment you approve the preview rather than from the moment you order. Approving the preview usually happens the same day or the next. Shipping is added after that and depends entirely on where it is going, which is the part nobody can promise in advance.

• Order by December 15 and there is comfortable room for both stages
• Between the 15th and the 20th it usually still arrives, but you are trusting the courier
• After the 20th, order it anyway and give it in January. Nobody minds a late gift that was clearly made for them

Why three days matters in December and nowhere else

In June the difference between three day production and three week production is a detail. In December it is the whole thing. Most made to order printing in this category quotes two to four weeks, which means the decision has to be made in November by somebody who has already thought about it.

Three days means the decision can be made in December by somebody who has just remembered. That is most people, most years.

You can also have it sent straight to them rather than to you. Put their address in at checkout. For anyone shipping across a country or an ocean, that removes a second leg of postage and several days.

December orders cluster into a handful of very recognisable shapes.

The family pet, for the whole household

The single most ordered Christmas gift here. It works because the dog belongs to everybody in the room, so it is one present that four people are pleased about. Cut to the animal's outline rather than left square, it stops looking like a cushion and starts looking like the dog.

The grandchild, for a grandparent

Grandparents are the hardest people on any list, because they buy what they need and want very little. A printed photograph of a grandchild solves that permanently, and it does not need setting up, charging or explaining.

The person who moved away

A student in a first year of university, a sibling who emigrated, a partner working in another city. At full length this stops being decorative and becomes something you can actually sleep against, which is a different kind of gift entirely.

The joke nobody tops

Somebody's face, printed large, given in front of an audience. Every family has exactly one person this is correct for, and everybody reading this already knows who it is.

The first Christmas without them

A meaningful share of December orders are memorials, for a person or a pet who died during the year. If that is what you are ordering, say so in the notes. It gets handled personally rather than moving through the usual queue, and it costs nothing extra.

The photo decides most of the result, and getting it right takes about two minutes.

Send the original from your camera roll. Not a screenshot, not something forwarded through a messaging app, not an image saved from social media. Each of those steps compresses the file and throws away detail that cannot be put back. On a small cushion it may not show. At full length it will.

Daylight beats a ceiling light every time, and for an animal, crouch until the camera is level with their eyes. Photographs taken from standing height enlarge the nose and shrink the head, which is the single most common problem we see.

Which format suits which gift

For a pet, a die cut shape that follows their outline reads as the animal rather than as a printed square. That is covered on the custom pet pillow page, with separate guides for a custom dog pillow and a custom cat pillow.

For a person you miss, full length is the one that works, because at 150 cm it is something to hold rather than something to look at. Read the custom body pillow guide before you choose the photo, because the print area is three times taller than it is wide and that changes which pictures work.

For the joke, a custom face pillow cut around the head is the version that gets the reaction. For several photos at once, a collage on a custom photo pillow holds up to nine images while staying readable from across a room.

Christmas is the biggest of these but it is not the only one. If you are buying for a specific person rather than for the day itself, these go into more detail.

• Custom gifts for him, for the father, brother or friend who buys himself what he wants
• Custom gifts for her, and what tends to get kept rather than stored
• Custom family gifts, including how to fit several people onto one layout
• Custom couple gifts, for buying for two people as a pair rather than separately
• Custom pillows, every shape and size we print, side by side