Why I’m Rethinking Amazon Wish Lists for Christmas (And What We Do Instead)
The list appeared on my phone at 6:47 on a Tuesday night. My son, age eight, was supposed to be brushing his teeth. Instead he was standing behind me at the kitchen counter, scrolling through Amazon, clicking “add to list” on a LEGO set he’d seen in a YouTube video two days earlier.
“Mom, look,” he said, holding the screen up like a trophy. “I found it. That’s the one I was telling you about.”
I looked. The wish list he’d made with me two weeks ago — eleven items, which I’d thought was already a lot — had grown to thirty-one. Some of them he’d added himself. Some were things he’d already forgotten he’d put there. “If we send this link to Grandma,” he said, “she’ll know exactly what to get me.”
That was when I felt it. That small, tight feeling in my chest. Not anger, not quite disappointment. Just a sense that something had shifted, quietly, without my noticing.
I tried to remember what Christmas felt like for me at his age. My grandmother lived three hours away in a house that smelled like boiled cabbage and lavender. She was not on Amazon, obviously. She had a shelf of gift wrap in her closet, and every year she gave me a sweater — often the wrong size, sometimes a color I would never have chosen myself. I wore those sweaters anyway. I loved them, not because of the sweaters, but because she had stood in a shop and thought about me.
I looked at my son’s thirty-one-item list and tried to explain that to him. I failed, mostly. He stared at me the way kids stare when you’re trying to make a point that has nothing to do with a LEGO dragon.
But here’s the thing — he’s not wrong to want the list. At eight, his brain is wired concretely. He sees something on a screen, he feels a genuine desire for it, and he writes it down. That’s not greed. That’s just how a child processes the world when the world is a search bar.
The real issue isn’t the wish list. It’s the expectation we let grow around it. The idea that a list is something you send, and something you receive, and that Christmas is essentially a delivery service with better packaging.
We decided to change a few things. Small things. Not a ban on Amazon, because I’m not a hypocrite and I also don’t have the energy for that campaign.
First, we shrunk the list. Eleven items became five. I told him: “If you get to pick five things, you have to actually choose.” It forced him to think about what mattered most — and it meant grandparents weren’t staring at a menu of sixty options, paralyzed and guilty.
Second, we made a new rule: the list is a reference for the people who love him, not a public document. We don’t share the link in the family group chat. His grandparents have it because they asked for it. That’s it. When a list is too public, it becomes a competition — everyone sees what everyone else bought, and suddenly Christmas has a scoreboard. We just don’t need that.
Third — and this was the one he grumbled about — I told him I was going to get him one thing that was not on his list. “A surprise,” I called it. He said, “But I don’t know what it is.” I said, “Exactly. That’s the point.”
The surprise gift is my small rebellion. It’s a way of keeping one thread of the old magic intact. It tells him: gift-giving is not just about fulfilling orders. It’s also about someone thinking about you — sometimes accurately, sometimes not, but always with intention.
I also started paying more attention to how he gives, not just receives. A couple of weeks ago, we were doing Secret Santa for his cousins, and he wanted to use a wish list for that too. I said no at first. Then I said maybe. Then I said: “Okay, but you have to pick something for your cousin that’s not on the list.”
He complained. He settled on a model dinosaur (off-list) and one item from the list. On Christmas, his cousin unwrapped the dinosaur first — and it was the thing he brought up at dinner later, the one he talked about for the rest of the afternoon. “I knew he actually likes dinosaurs,” my son said, already claiming credit. But I saw him notice. What his cousin liked wasn’t the exact item from the algorithm. It was the being-known.
I don’t want to overstate what this teaches. It’s one dinosaur. It’s one Christmas. I’m not running an ethics course here, and I’m fully aware that some years the list wins, the Amazon boxes pile up, and we all shrug. There’s no real harm in a curated delivery. The harm is only when the whole season becomes that — when the list is the only language of giving, and a child starts to believe that receiving the Thing They Asked For is the definition of love.
There are also families where wish lists are a lifeline. Relatives who need help, who live far away, who can’t browse a store in person. A wish list might be the only way a grandmother who doesn’t know what a nine-year-old likes in 2024 can get them something they’ll actually use. I’m not against it. I’m just against the list as a contract.
I pulled my son aside the other night while he was adding things to his list again — he can’t help it. I told him, “You have five. You have to decide which five to keep.” He deleted a drone, kept the LEGO. Then he looked up at me and said, “Are you sure only five? Grandma said she’d get me more.”
That’s the test, I guess. The moment where I have to say, “Yes, only five. And that’s okay. You’re not being short-changed. You’re being given a reason to want what you get.”
We’ll see how Christmas lands. We’ll see if he’s disappointed, if he’s confused, if the surprise gift is good enough or if he sulks about the drone. Part of me expects a tantrum in a box of wrapping paper. Part of me thinks he might surprise me. That’s the thing about this — it’s not a problem you solve once. It’s a conversation you have every year, in every store, on every screen. We’re muddling through it, one five-item list at a time. And somewhere in my closet, there’s a gift he’s never going to expect. I’m actually excited to give it.
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