In article , E wrote:
"Kevin Karplus" wrote in message
...
My son has 12 cousins, so we gave up on keeping track of birthdays of
our nieces and nephews quite some time ago. We do give holiday gifts
(mostly Christmas) until the kids turn 18 (which reduced the number to
8 last year).

I remember when I was a teen and the presents stopped. I'm thinking I would
do it the other way around - start giving the gifts to the teenagers. they
are (I was) old enough to appreciate them at that age, and probably "need"
stuff more. I know I would have loved little thoughtful things at that age,
and especially when I was in college. by then, I also knew how to write a
nice thank you note.
the younger ones don't really "need *that* much stuff, get tons of
hand-me-downs, and don't bother to write TY's, or aren't old enough to know
how...

Ahh, but buying presents for young kids is fun, while trying to find
presents for adults or teens that you barely know is TOUGH. We see
the various cousins less often than once a year, and the parents are
not always very helpful in telling us what the kids are interested in.
The thank-you notes aren't what I give presents for anyway.

--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.