My interest is in story, whether it’s fictional or factual, whether it’s a book, a movie, or a radio play. In my family, we have stockings stuffed with various items. Some expensive (relatively), some cheap, some used, some new, and some free. My father is particularly hard to shop for. My parents are retired and for the most part have reached a point in their lives where they don’t “need” anything that they don’t have or can’t buy for themselves. My mother, at least, always has some ideas for what to get her if I can’t think of anything. But my dad always insists he doesn’t need anything and my mother and I keep telling him that one day he’ll get exactly what he asks for (we always manage to find something in the end).
Last year I tried something different. It didn’t cost me anything other than a bit of time, but it provided a few hours of entertainment for my dad and I thought I would share the idea with you in case you are looking for gift ideas, particularly ones that cost as close to $0 as you can get and still be entirely legal and ethical.
What I gave my dad last year were a handful of CDs with hours of old radio plays that he hadn’t heard since he was my age or younger. My parents tell stories of sitting around on spaghetti night listening to their favourite radio play every week. Whether you’ve heard radio plays before or not, they are an interesting and entertaining gift (I listen to them myself), not to mention a glimpse at storytelling from a different era. You can find a number of genres and episodes online as free podcasts on iTunes.com or you can do a search for ‘old radio plays’ for other sites. If your gift recipient doesn’t have a means to play mp3s, you can easily convert them to a format that plays on regular CD players.
If radio plays don’t appeal to you or your intended gift recipient, there are other forms of story downloads that might appeal to someone on your gift list:
A selection of audiobooks (or even just one) from Podiobooks.com.
A selection of free ebooks (or even just one). And if you don’t know where you might find those, then a little spelunking through Booklorn’s archives should fix you up.
Got any ideas or tips to share on gift-giving this season?
5 Comments
What a great idea! My parents are getting harder to buy for too - it usually ends up being a book or movie, or some type of food-stuff.
My Dad used to listen to “The Shadow” on the radio!! I’m going to go browse and see what I can find!
Wendi
Wendi´s last blog post..Teaser Tuesday: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
There are a few episodes of the The Shadow in the Old Time Radio Thrillers channel of iTunes according to my library.
Awesome Ideas
I am actually going check the links out 
veens´s last blog post..BTT and Me Wishes YOU - Happy Thanksgiving
Great idea!
A cool source for free audiobooks is http://librivox.org/. They have volunteers do audio recordings of books in the public domain, which means there are lots of classics. I haven’t listened enough to know if the readers are consistently good, but what I have heard has been just fine.
Teresa´s last blog post..Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood
Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to poke around that site sometime (in my spare time, heh).