A photo calendar is the one personalised print most people order every year, and most of them order it in the second week of December. So does everyone else. Production times that are two working days in October become ten in December, and the delivery promise on the website is a promise about dispatch, not arrival. The whole game with photo gifts is timing.
Order by the end of November
Every service publishes a last order date for Christmas delivery, and they hold to it. What they cannot control is the carrier in the last week, so treat the published date as the latest possible and aim two weeks earlier. A calendar ordered in November costs the same as one ordered in December and arrives with time to wrap it.
If you miss the date, a voucher for a photo book or a print is the honest fallback, and several services sell them.
Calendars: the format matters more than the paper
The A3 wall calendar with one photo per month is the classic and the best value. A landscape A4 works for a kitchen; a square format is good for phone photos, which are mostly 4:3 and crop badly into A-series. Spiral binding lasts a year of flipping; stapled calendars do not. Some services let you start the calendar in any month, which is the difference between a January gift and a birthday gift.
Cewe and Pixum have the widest calendar ranges, including desk, planner and family formats with a column per person. Albelli and Photobox are simpler and cheaper, and their editors put a calendar together in minutes from a folder of photos. For a printed-look calendar of your own design, Onlineprinters and WIRmachenDRUCK take a finished PDF and print in quantity, which is the route for a club, a school or a business.
Gifts that survive the post, and gifts that do not
A mug is printed by heat transfer, and the photo sits on a curved surface, so a face across the seam looks wrong. Put the photo on one side and text on the other. A cushion cover prints well on the fabric side and hides a poor photo. A puzzle wants a busy image; a photo with a big plain sky is unsolvable and no fun. Phone cases and keyrings have tiny print areas, so a single face or an initial works and a group shot does not.
Anything with glass or ceramic gets broken in the post more often in December than in any other month, because the parcels are stacked higher. If a mug matters, order two.
Photo quality on gifts
The print area on most gifts is small, so resolution rarely matters; colour does. Mugs and metal prints are bright and saturated, fabric is soft and muted, wood and slate are dark and lose contrast. Pick the photo for the surface: a bright, simple, high-contrast image on wood or slate, and anything you like on ceramic.
What we would do
One A3 spiral wall calendar per household, ordered the last week of November, from whichever of Cewe, Pixum, Albelli or Photobox has a promotion running in your country. A second, smaller gift from the same order to spread the delivery cost. Nothing fragile in the last ten days before Christmas.