I know for a fact that there are thousands of stationery lovers out there, who like me, love nothing more than filling our studies with one too many stationery items and getting them out at every given opportunity. This often leads to planners that make your eyes hurt because they’ve been filled with a million different colour coordinated memos, or text books loaded with sticky notes on every page and obviously there’s the ever growing stockpile of notebooks.
This may seem like overkill for a lot of people, but there is an upside to our stationery obsession; we are extremely easy to buy Christmas gifts for!
So if a friend or family member of yours is an extreme stationery geek, like myself, the following list of potential gifts are sure to delight them this Christmas…
Now the first staple item has to be a new planner for the upcoming new year. These can take many forms, the most standard of which is a diary. For a college or university student I would recommend purchasing one that has a maximum of three days per page, as we have a tendency of making long lists. Another recommendation would be to avoid diaries bigger than A5 size, as they will be carried around with us on a daily basis.
Personally I would prefer a filofax, as these can be easy to personalise. They allow you to clip in or out favoured sections and said sections can be replenished time and time again with filofax refills. WHSmith have a great selection of filofaxes and refills.
If you’re searching for a more personal gift you could opt for the personalised planner. There are a variety of websites that offer you the chance to create a planner yourself and fill it with everything your stationery lover could ever need. Try Lifeplanner.
I am 99.9% sure that EVERY stationery lover enjoys using and over-abusing sticky note pads, creating another viable gift option. You can buy individual packs in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours.
One of my favourite and more interesting sticky notes are the packs that are fruit shaped. You can buy these from many different stores, Amazon having the biggest selection. There are lots of different varieties available like watermelon, peach, strawberry and kiwi, as well as your more standard apple and pear.
If you would rather the more conventional style of sticky note pads over the novelty kind, then a sticky note pad set makes a lovely gift. 
These can be quirky, like the Einstein’s gluons sticky notes booklet, or be beautifully simple, like the deluxe leather box set. You can buy sets like these in most stationery stores. One of the many benefits of a present such as this is that it isn’t an overly expensive gift and yet it shows how well you know your stationery loving friend.
The next item on the list is a personal favourite (hint, hint, nudge, nudge dad!) and 
it’s what I like to call the Sharpie mega pack. Any stationery lover would get a secret thrill out of a gift like this, not to mention think of all the colour coordinated magic they could accomplish!
The next step would be to purchase a desk or drawer organiser for all those Sharpies, so as to display them and all their colourful wonderfullness. Desk organisers can be very useful for a student, allowing them quick and easy access to much needed stationery supplies and often saving them space, which when living in a dorm room, they quite often lack. Again these can be purchased in any stationery store and come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Notebooks are also an essential for any student. Although they can be thought of as a more boring present, they are easily customised to provide a loving gift. Notebooks can be bought online and printed with a personalised message on the cover, or even if you have the time and creativity for such a thing, can be customised at home as an arts and crafts project. I would recommend, opting for a project notebook over the standard form, as these come with inbuilt dividers.
The last two items on the list are not as fundamental for student life as the items listed previously, however they are quite interesting novelty gifts and would no doubt be appreciated by any stationery lover. 
The first of the two are novelty tape dispensers.
These can brighten up any desk and can be handpicked to suit the gift receiver. One of my favourites is the vintage penny farthing tape dispenser.
The last thing on the list is the every occasion card box set. This set would make any student’s life just a little bit easier and would still be considered comical enough, by the receiver of the card, to get away with not being thought of as a lazy option! It’s win win. 
Hope this helps. Part two of this article: Dear Santa – Gadget Edition out soon!