“What am I supposed to give Anthony as a wedding gift?” I asked Kristin, my bridesmaid and person-who-was-married. “I mean, what kinds of things do brides give their grooms? I was thinking of hiring someone to clean the house before we left for the honeymoon so we’d come back to a spotless house. Is that a good wedding gift?”

“Um, no,” she said gently, so as not to make me feel like an idiot. “It should be something personal. Like, you could paint him a picture, or make a scrapbook, or write him a poem...”

A poem? Why, I had at least a dozen poems I’d written about him that he’d never seen. And if I wrote a few more, I’d have a whole chapbook!

That’s exactly what I did. Over the next couple of months, I wrote more poems. I wrote the final one the day before our wedding, capturing my feelings on the eve of our marriage. Then I printed them out, three-hole-punched them, made a cardstock cover, and tied the pages together with ribbon.

On our wedding day, I took him aside after our ceremony and read him the last poem. It was a perfect gift.

But you don’t have to wait for such a monumental occasion to use writing as a gift. One of my friends writes children’s books and illustrates them, then gives them to her grandkids on their birthdays. A successful greeting card publisher started out her business because she used to write original cards for all of her family and friends-- they loved them so much that they encouraged her to offer her sentiments to the masses.

I’ve also “donated” personal essays to anthologies, just so I could give the book as a gift to the person the essay was about. I wrote a love letter to Anthony and sent it off to be published in the anthology Love Letters of a Lifetime, then gave it to him for Valentine’s Day.