My Mom is turning 90 this year. There’s only ONE THING she wants and that’s tickets to the US Open Tennis matches in New York in August. Well, that ain’t gonna happen from me! My Mom has lived and breathed tennis for her whole life, but I will have to leave her obsession for my sister’s to handle. While trying to figure out just what to get her, I stumbled over some of my son’s photos from his travels as a jazz musician for the Royal Caribbean International cruise line. He’s worked cruises in the Caribbean (Antigua, Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Saint Martin, etc.), Mexico, and the Mediterranean (Spain and Italy), and taken photographs in each locale. He’s really funny, as many of the shots he sends me are pieces of tourist attractions with his face obscuring most of it. He seems to love shooting photos from the front of the camera. A pictoral confirmation that his feet were on the ground where the attraction resides, I suppose.

My first thought was to make a photo collage of some of his shots for Mom, but then remembered she shoves pictures into drawers, folds them, or sticks them on a cork board and customizes them with thumb tack holes, everywhere. I’ll never forget when I asked her to send me some childhood photos of one of my sisters–they arrived folded in half in an envelope! Who in their right mind folds photos? In another of her bizarre gestures, she sent me some of my Dad’s framed documents stuck in a box with no protection. Needless to say, all I got was a lot of glass shards, broken frames, and some very scratched up documents. It took me weeks to get all the teeny glass fragments out of my carpet. I shudder to think of the many ways she might maim any photographic gift I send her way.

Back to my gift dilemma…
While perusing photo gift pages on a few sites, I saw some mugs. My Mom drinks tea and coffee; it’s probably the only thing she still cooks. I figure Mom can’t mutilate a mug, so I found a reasonably priced one for sale at VistaPrint. Mugs are useful budget gifts that can deliver a personal message every day without withering and dying like flowers or ending up in the trash like cards. Think about it, who can’t use a mug?

I did a quick Photoshop edit on a few of my son’s shots and voilà! A respectable personalized present. So, I ordered three. That way if she breaks it, there’s another one buried away on my shelf as a replacement, plus I figured my son might want one (or he might just roll his eyes).

If you think about it, a customized mug is a really great way to show off your photographs and deliver reasonably priced presents to almost anyone. Stay tuned for a review of the quality of my mug. Here is what I ordered:

Collage Mugs by Vistaprint

Oh, and by the way, if you enter Royal Caribbean’s new “Win a Vacation of a Life” contest, you could end up on the ship where my son plays, if you win second prize!

ilene’s machine is endorsed by Bare Bones Software, The Omni Group, Marketcircle, and ProfusionApp . The opinions expressed are my own.