Vacation souvenirs don’t have to be hard! Stick to my simple vacation souvenir rules and never stress out about souvenirs again!
Vacation souvenirs can be a source of stress if you don’t have a plan for them before you travel. The sheer volume of souvenirs available to purchase regardless of your destination is simply overwhelming. Add kids to the mix and it gets exponentially worse. They will want to buy everything!
Over the years, I’ve turned vacation souvenirs into a completely manageable part of any trip we take. With some travel experience under my belt (both with and without kids), I’ve come up with vacation souvenir rules that apply to every trip we take. I’m sharing my vacation souvenir rules with you to hopefully help you develop a plan for your next trip. My vacation souvenir rules aren’t the only way to manage souvenirs, and they might not be the best way for your family. These rules are just my way of handling vacation souvenirs. They work for us and you might grab an idea or two from them. Plus, I might share a favorite vacation souvenir or two that I’ve acquired over the years to make this post a bit more fun!
Ready to get into my vacation souvenir rules? Let’s get into it!
Vacation Souvenir Rules
Family
First up, let’s talk about the vacation souvenirs we get for the whole family. The first of our vacation souvenir rules is that, every trip, we get three family souvenirs – a magnet, an ornament, and a golf ball. We limit ourselves to one item in each of these three categories per trip, so sometimes we have no make hard decisions. Let’s talk about why these three family vacation souvenirs work for us.
Magnet
My Mam (this was our name for our paternal grandmother) wasn’t a big traveler. She was terrified of airplanes, so her vacation options were limited. To involve her in our trips even when she didn’t go, we would always bring her back a refrigerator magnet from wherever we went. We spent a lot of time at her house as kids, and I would love to look at the refrigerator magnets and talk about memories from each trip. It was a nice point of connection with my Mam that I think fondly of now, 18 years after she passed.
When I grew up and got my own fridge, I knew I wanted to make it into a vacation scrapbook just like we made my Mam’s fridge. We have magnets from all our trips on the fridge, and it brings me pure joy when the kids pull them down and want to talk about where we got each one. We get to talk about our recent trip to San Diego that everyone got to enjoy and I get to tell them about trips like our Alaskan cruise that happened before they were born. These little vacation souvenirs are awesome conversation starters!
Ornament
There are two types of people – those who have a perfectly coordinated Christmas tree and those who have a completely mismatched, hot mess of a Christmas tree. I definitely belong to the second group. I love my mismatched tree!
What makes me love my mismatched tree is the ornaments we have accumulated from all over the place. We have ornaments from our vacations, souvenir ornaments that friends and family members have brought back from their vacations, and relics from our childhoods. It’s a glorious mess in the corner of our family room every December!
This amazing source of joy during the holiday season wouldn’t be possible without grabbing a new ornament every time we travel. And we all decide on which ornament to buy as our vacation souvenir together as a family (although Mom gets veto power!), so we can all take some ownership of it. If you’re not buying ornaments on vacation, I highly recommend you start on your next trip.
Golf ball
Similar to my family bringing Mam back a magnet from our travels, my husband’s family brought his Pap back a souvenir golf ball from their travels. When Pap passed away, my husband got them back and used Pap’s collection to start his own collection. It’s a little connection to his grandfather, and I’m in full support.
Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to find souvenir golf balls these days. On two of our last three vacations, we ended up going on eBay on our trip home to buy a souvenir golf ball from our vacation destination because we struck out while we were there. The third trip didn’t fare much better. My husband ended up talking the kid at the mini golf place into selling him a ball on which he wrote details of our trip. We’re doing what we can!
Kids
If you have kids, you will not be surprised that we have a few vacation souvenir rules just for them. My kids would seriously buy everything everywhere we went if we didn’t. We’ve decided to set pretty flexible vacation souvenir rules for our kids when we travel, so hopefully you can adapt our rules and apply them on your family trips.
Set a budget
You’ve got the give kids a souvenir budget. That’s really the only way this works. Whether you give them a souvenir budget for the whole trip or for each souvenir buying opportunity is up to you. We’ve done both and had success with both options. Which budget structure we choose typically depends on the type of trip we’re taking. On our San Diego trip, we knew our kids would want souvenirs from several of the places we were going, so we set a budget per stop. For trips that really only lend themselves to one souvenir, we tend to set a budget for the whole trip.
Of course, the budget you give your kids is a personal choice. Where you’re going, your personal economic situation, and your particular kids will all influence the budget you set. Just pick a number and stick to it.
No junk
My biggest kid-specific vacation souvenir rule is no junk. If something is going to break before we even get home or just get thrown on a kids’ bedroom floor only to get stepped on repeatedly for weeks, it’s a no.
Even though the no junk rule is pretty obvious, it’s actually pretty hard to stick to because most souvenir shops are filled with kid junk. So, what have we found that’s not junk? I’m so glad you asked!
- LEGO Minifigure wallet
- Keychain compass
- Books
- Water bottle stickers
- T-shirt/sweatshirt
Parents help
I think this kid-specific vacation souvenir rule has a shelf life, but for now when my kids are still young (6.5 and 4), mom and dad get final approval of any souvenir the kids want to buy. We mostly have this rule to enforce our no junk rule, because kids don’t know what’s junk and what’s not junk. But this rule also helps keep our kids on their souvenir budget, so it really kills two rules with one stone.
Parents
Rounding out my vacation souvenir rules are the rules aimed at what souvenirs the parents get to buy. This one is easy because the parent-specific vacation souvenir rule is that there are no rules!
My husband and I aren’t huge souvenir people, so we’ve made a decision that if we find a souvenir we actually want while on vacation, we have carte blanche to buy it (within reason, of course). We’ve bought t-shirts from stores we’ve visited and really liked, craft beer (if we’re driving), and the perfect size and weight coffee mug that happened to be sold at Disney World. Perhaps our favorite discretionary souvenir is art. We love to buy art prints that we find on our “bigger” vacation and hang them in our home upon our return. So far, we’ve done this in Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii. I mean, I sure love passing the Na’Pali Coast every time I go into my office. It reminds me of happy times and gives me resolve to work hard so we can go back someday.
Other posts
I’ve been doing a bit of a travel series this summer, whether consciously or unconsciously. If you’ve missed any of my travel posts, here are a few I think you’d like:
Do you feel better about setting your own vacation souvenir rules now? I sure hope so! What’s the best souvenir you’ve ever bought on vacation? Share down below or over on Instagram @sarainseason!