My favourite holiday tech gift doesn’t require batteries or software updates. It’s not even a gadget, though it was made with technology.

A few years ago, my wife experimented with her iPad and a digital stylus to make digital illustrations. Using Procreate, a drawing app, she loaded a photo of our beloved corgi, Max, as a reference to trace over before embellishing the image with a polka-dot bow tie and a cartoonishly long tongue. I picked a background colour that would complement our home and uploaded the illustration to the app Keepsake, a printing service that assembles your images in a nice frame and delivers them to your door.

A large framed portrait of Max now hangs as a centerpiece in our living room. It makes me smile and is always a conversation starter when we have guests over. That’s more than I can say about other tech gifts that I’ve received over the years, such as video games and smart speakers, which only brought short-lived joy.

This type of gifting exercise — tech-adjacent presents that don’t involve hardware or thoughtless Best Buy gift cards — may be especially welcome this year.

Here’s a list of ideas for tech gifts we can give without actually buying tech, from the presents you can create to experiences that will last.

The gift of fixing

Last week, I told a friend I had a special present for her: I’d fix her iPhone problem.

Her 5-year-old iPhone SE could no longer take photos or instal software updates because nearly all of the device’s data storage was used up.

So I met her for lunch and walked her through the process of backing up photos to an external drive before purging all the images. Then I plugged her phone into a computer to back up all her data before installing the new operating system. She was thrilled.

For those who are tech savvy, this may serve as a template. Listen to your loved ones’ complaints about their tech and offer the gift of solving the problem. If it’s a sluggish WiFi connection, see if you can diagnose the issue to boost speeds. If it’s a short-lived phone battery, consider taking them to a repair shop to get the battery replaced for a small sum.

The gift of creation

Apart from the example of the digital illustration of my dog, there are plenty of other ways we can use tech to create for friends and family.

For one, I’m a fan of photo books that can easily be created with web tools. A few years ago, a colleague’s Secret Santa gift for me was a calendar she made using Google’s photo books service. She created it by pulling photos from my dog’s Instagram account and compiling them into a calendar — each month was a different photo of Max posing next to an entree cooked by my wife and me. I was delighted.

Photo-printing services offer nice ways to turn digital photos into physical keepsakes — large prints, mugs and Christmas ornaments.

The gift of knowledge

Before the pandemic upended our lives, my wife bought a DSLR with the goal of learning more about digital photography. Then the lockdowns happened, vacations turned into staycations and the camera ended up living in a drawer.

My plan for a holiday present for my wife is a two-hour digital photography lesson with a photo studio in San Francisco, US, that takes students on a stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge while teaching the fundamentals of photography.

What would your friends and family like to learn? We have plenty of options for potential gift classes, since the pandemic drove many teachers to offer virtual instruction, including for cooking lessons and workout routines. The gift of knowledge goes a long way and sometimes gives back, like when the recipient of cooking lessons uses it to make you dinner.

The gift of no tech

The pandemic may have exposed us to more screen time than we could ever imagine enduring, so a great gift this year could also be anything that takes our attention away from tech. That could be renting a cabin in an area with no cellular service, a winter hike and a picnic — anything that gives us respite from our inevitable return to screens.

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