Grad to grad: Graduation gift ideas for every kind of friendship

Choosing your best friend’s graduation gift goes beyond commemorating the amazing friendship you’ve had so far. In addition to reminiscing about the stories you’ll repeatedly tell slightly annoyed new friends, you can show you care about the future of your friendship.

Send any one of these gifts on their own—or bundle them together in a BFF graduation care package decorated with pictures of the two of you together.

• Start a long-distance book club. Pick one of your favourite books—you can grab it right off your shelf—and fill it up with your thoughts. Use these stickers to add comments and bookmark the best parts. Send it with a note encouraging your BFF to send the book back with comments of their own.
• Fill a colourful journal with inside jokes, poems, quotes and memes.
• Add a picture of you both to a grad photo frame and deliver it with a displayable card to brighten up their living area and remind them of you.
• Make a bestie’s day better with a bundle of mini cards, gift cards, favourite candy or compliments labelled with “open when you’re feeling [insert icky emotion]” labels. Fill up a gift box—or make it portable with a zipper bag. Whenever your friend has a bad day, they can open one of your cards or gifts and get an instant mood boost.
• Keep them busy with something creative. Give some arts and crafts projects—or for the professional doodler, step it up with Crayola Signature art supplies.

Helpful Tip: The range of emotions for your “open when” labels can be vast. “Open when you’re drowning in homework” is just as important as “open when you’re feeling sad.”

They made you smile every time you saw them before class, after tests, at meetings, during practice, at rehearsals, for archaic rituals, whatever. In big and little ways, they sure did help you survive academia. Giving tiny grad gifts to a friend who always lent you a pen or laughed at your jokes is a really nice way to let them know they matter.

Helpful Tips:

Want to give a little something to a lot of people? Give a card with a “tuck-in gift” inside. Write a personal, heartfelt or funny message inside. And decorate the envelope with hand-lettering, stickers and washi tape.

Oh, and…graduation gifts for friends don’t have to cost anything but time. A personalized compilation of TikToks can matter as much as anything tangible. Add feel-good and funny content to your phone notes when you find it and share them whenever you want.

• Cheer them on. These upbeat stickers or a gift book full of pep talks will help them feel encouraged on the daily.
• Class acquaintances can be mysterious, but you know they’re graduating. You know they have dreams. You’re pretty sure they’re human. A little encouragement means a lot. A sweet mini card is just the right level of appreciation and you can get a filled-in one or a blank one if you want to say a little something extra.

Helpful Tips:

A word about The Practical Graduation Present: Without being so drab as to gift reusable food storage, you can give something you know will be useful after graduation. Look for the things you connected over and see if they can be turned into thoughtful, useful gifts.

• Maybe you carpooled to rehearsals together, in which case our car coasters or car air fresheners would be nice nods to how your friendship helped you both out.
• You could also get a gift card for the coffee place you always stopped at and a travel mug to hold said coffee.
• If you always borrowed their pen (and maybe lost a few along the way), a fancy pen might be a good gift. It’s practical on the surface, but it honours a connection you had. That means it’s actually cute and practical.
• Or socks. Everyone likes socks.

Just make sure it still feels celebratory by adding a card. And make it even more festive by sticking bows and ribbons on it, attaching a gift tag or putting it in a tiny bag.

• Go for the joke. The class- or club-related inside jokes between you and this friend are possibly the only connections you have. But that’s what got you through the day, and they’re worth celebrating. Write a fun reference to a dumb classroom poster, a phrase the teacher always said, or a memorable group project in a funny grad card. You can slip the card into their yearbook or locker, casually give it to them in person or awkwardly give it to them in person. No matter what, they’ll appreciate it.

Helpful Tip: When all else fails, give like you’re a distant relative who was told they like a certain thing one time, and now you only ever give them gifts related to that thing. Example: If you notice they have a lot of plant-related stuff, add to the collection with a displayable card bouquet or just literally anything plant-adjacent.

When your older friends graduate and selfishly leave you behind, you’ll still want to show them you appreciate their friendship. They’re on to a new chapter, so even if you feel heartlessly abandoned, you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t want to wish them luck.

• Wish them good luck. A short and simple graduation card says just enough if you’re not supertight. If you are closer, you can step it up with something more heartfelt and tuck in a favourite quote, a friendship bracelet or pin, whatever. There are so many possibilities.
• Help them stay in touch. If you feel nervous about being left, your friend is probably nervous about leaving. Gifts that can help your friend stay in touch, as well as help them make new friends, are thoughtful AF. We recommend fancy stationery and a game or deck of classic cards.
• Send them off with some snuggles in the form of stuffed animal friends. If you’re after matching stuffed animal friends for both of you, look no further than these adorable big friend “Warmies”—the filling contains French lavender so when you heat them in the microwave they smell good and reduce tension. (Just don’t forget to reunite them every once in a while—they’re a bonded pair.)

Helpful Tip: If you want to go handmade, you could make a bingo game of all the stereotypical experiences coming your friend’s way. Example: an off-to-college bingo chart might have squares like “stay up all night,” or “get locked out of your dorm” or “actually drink a full bottle of water.”