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Here's what I had come up with for a plan for holiday gifts:

For Mom: A laundry basket. Yes, this does break at least two of the unspoken rules of Christmas gifts: too practical, and big enough that it would be awkward to wrap and fit under the tree. Also, it might imply criticism of her habit, of late, of sending her laundry out to the cleaners. But she really needs a laundry basket, goshdarnit. It galls me that since the laundry baskets got lost in the chaos of all our recent downsizing and decluttering, when she does do her laundry at home, she carries her laundry upstairs in a plastic trash bag. These must wear out after a small number of uses.

For Sophia: 3 or 4 of the following:
* Tickets to the Adele concert at TD Garden (in September).
* Any Doctor Who-themed media spin-off book.
* A home-made denim robot plushy, patterned on the design she drew.
* A "cherry pie kit": a couple of jars of cherry pie filling plus a note promising that I will spend the time to make the pie crusts and help with baking. (Truly a generous gift of my time; not only is making pie crust a pain in the butt, but I don't even like cherry pie.)
* About $30 somehow attached to the Apple ID she uses on the iPad, so she can buy some games. (The Apple ID has no credit card associated with it, so she can't get anything currently, not even if it costs a penny. I do not want to associate my credit card with it, because I want her ability to buy games to run out after $30, whereas my credit card is a bottomless well. I don't want to associate my credit card with it and change the password on the Apple ID, because then she would always have to come to me for free stuff and updates and so on, and that would make her mad. Apple has an iTunes gift card that works on the App Store, but I think Sophia has some issue with using iTunes, such that she has refused to set up an iTunes account. I can't buy the games on a different Apple ID because there's some limit to the number of times you can switch between different Apple IDs on a device... I think... right? I could get a prepaid card, I guess, but these seem to all have fees? Irksome.)

Well. Tickets for Adele went on sale this morning, and sold out in about 10 minutes. No luck securing tickets, even though I was on ticketmaster.com the moment tickets went on sale. I wish that either the big stars did more live shows, or Sophia were really into some more obscure artist rather than the hugely over-the-top popular hit.

So I went to Barnes & Noble in search of Doctor Who swag. The array of gifts on display put the stuff-buying spell on me. No Doctor Who swag, but I walked out of there with a programmable robot kit (for Sophia), The Witches: Salem 1692 (for Mom), and a jigsaw puzzle (for the two of them). Plus a book for myself. I don't know that these are the perfect gifts, and if I were listening to my inner perfectionist I wouldn't have gotten them. My inner perfectionist worries that Sophia is going to say "mom you got me something for learning to program last year so does Christmas always have to be all about self-improvement with you? I don't even want to be a programmer." She worries that even though it's traditional to give my mother a book for Christmas, especially a history book, especially early New England history (as she has this morbid fascination with how hard life was for the Puritan colonists), perhaps this pattern has become a cliche and maybe my mother is tired of this topic now? (N.B. that while it violates the unspoken rules of Christmas gifts to repeat gifts exactly from year to year, it's perfectly fine have a particular category of gifts be the standard thing for a particular person.) And what do I know about this book, is it any good? And, the perfectionist worries that the puzzle will be regarded as random, "you just grabbed whatever on the way to the register at the last minute, right?" Shut up, Inner Perfectionist. It will probably be fine.

Just to take the pressure of being all the shiniest be-all and end-all of gifting off of the programmable robot, I still want to have a couple more gifts for Sophia. Just little things. Adele tickets are not happening (just checked... nope, still no tickets); shopping for a Doctor Who book will be easier at Arisia and thus a birthday gift; and the Apple ID/iPad games thing I should hold back until I need an extraordinary bribe for extraordinarily good behavior, and really would work best if I discussed the payment logistics with Sophia up front. ("Here's an iTunes gift card for coming to work with me and being so quiet!... So, why don't you have an iTunes account?") That leaves the cherry pie kit, and the home-made robot plushy. Wish me luck on my newest holiday-related sewing project.

Come to think of it, I do have an extra pop-up laundry hamper. I think it would also work for transporting the laundry, not just collecting it. Since it's pop-up, it can be folded back down and not take up space in Mom's very small apartment. I am not going to call it a "Christmas present" but this is what she needs. Good thing I saw the book so something fulfills the "Christmas Gift" criteria.