New grandparents present a specific gift problem at Christmas. The person the gift is really from — the baby — cannot buy anything, cannot sign anything, and has no opinions. So the parents buy it, and the whole thing risks reading as a present from the parents with the baby's name attached as decoration.
Six books here address that, in three versions each for grandmother and grandfather. Which one you want depends almost entirely on how you want to solve the from-whom problem.
If the gift is from the family
First Christmas as Grandma treats her as the subject and the new title as the occasion. Becoming a grandmother rearranges Christmas, and the book covers what that looks like: the recipes she is passing down, the spoiling she has now earned the right to do, the door that is always open.
First Christmas as Grandpa does the equivalent — the fun he is now officially permitted to cause, and the steady, unshowy love sitting underneath it.
These are the adult-to-adult versions. Give them when the gift is honestly from you rather than pretending otherwise. They also travel best as a gift posted to grandparents who live far away, because they do not depend on shared memories that have not happened yet.
If the gift is from the baby
This is where the other four come in, and they solve the problem two different ways.
On Our First Christmas Grandma is written from the baby to her, and it notices things a card would not: the extra blanket, the second helping, the way she claimed the rocking chair by the tree and nobody argued about it.
On Our First Christmas Grandpa does the same for the jobs he quietly absorbs — the ladder, the batteries, the walk around the block when the house gets too loud.
Those two details are the reason this version works. Grandfathers in particular tend to get thanked for nothing in particular, and a book that names the ladder and the batteries lands harder than one praising him in general terms.
If the child is old enough to have been there
My First Christmas with Grandma is told as a child remembering rather than a baby observing, and it is built on the correct observation that Grandma's house at Christmas is its own country — different cookies, different bedtime, different rules.
My First Christmas with Grandpa remembers the long walk, the terrible joke, and the pocket that always had something in it.
Use these when the child is old enough to have actually been present for some of it — which in practice means a second or third Christmas, not a first. Given for a newborn they read slightly ahead of the facts.
A note on ordering two
Most families have more than one set of grandparents, and the six titles here are singular — one for Grandma, one for Grandpa, no combined edition among them. If you are buying for a couple you are buying two books, which is worth knowing before the total surprises you at checkout.
If the pair go by Nanny and Poppy specifically, there is a single non-seasonal book addressed to both of them, covered in our grandpa book comparison. There is no Christmas equivalent of it.
Ordering
All six are $39.99 and come in hardcover and softcover, selected on the product page. Every one prints two names, the grandparent's and the grandchild's, so have both ready.
Books are printed to order in the United States with a two to four business day production window before shipping; nothing is held in stock. If the book is being posted on to grandparents rather than handed over, add their delivery time on top of that window and work backwards from the day they open it, not from Christmas Day.
Read both names back before paying — they appear in your cart, at checkout and on your order confirmation. Personalized books cannot be returned once printed, but a mistake reported quickly can usually be caught before it reaches the printer, and anything damaged or misprinted we replace free.
The rest of the seasonal titles are in Christmas & Holiday Stories. The parent versions of these same three formats are compared in which first Christmas as Mom or Dad book.