Buying Christmas presents is a tedious task and many of those presents will either be returned or get lost in long term storage. If you are a grandparent, it might be tempting to give cash, buy premium bonds or toys, but for a lasting present that doesn’t corrode (literally), nothing quite feels like buying gold bars or coins. 

With gold bars, the premium you pay over the raw material is relatively good compared with jewellery purchases. Unlike jewellery, the gold bars are usually sealed in a blister pack (24K Gold that is), hence it’s not worth bothering with cheaper alternatives like 14K, 18K gold commonly found in jewellery. 

In China, giving gold jewellery to children is quite common, but what I find is that the resale value is usually just the spot price of the raw materials, hence you might as well buy a few 1g gold bars to chuck into a red envelope…

My favourite gold bar brand is the P.A.M.P. bar, which stands for artistic precious metals products, because the design is quite nice, is very well respected and each bar has a serial number which can be verified through their app.

I previously purchased a 50g bar at Harrods, but you can also get the bars delivered to your door through a site like BullionByPost (use my code 
ZAIS TP8Y to receive a free 1oz silver bar above 250 pound spend). The price of gold has been relatively stable/increasing over the last few years, unlike the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other speculative assets. Unless you’re minted, you’re unlikely going to gift bitcoin to your relatives, since it isn’t physical (even the physical bitcoin coins are just a proxy for the underlying private key). 

Once, I remember gifting the equivalent of a pint of beer to a colleague (in Feathercoin), but a year later those coins would have been barely enough to buy a pint of tap water.