Surprises for Friends – 10 Unique, Funny and Unusual Ideas

With personal gifts and surprises, you often make friends very happy. You express how important they are to you. These 10 surprises for friends are easy to make and hardly cost anything, but they provide maximum joy!

It doesn’t take an occasion to make a really good friend happy once in a while. Just a small gift as a surprise shows that you think of the other person.

Sometimes you just want to do something good for a good friend who is having a stressful time. Or you want to thank them in an original way for their support during an exam preparation, a move or an event. These 10 little surprises for friends are uncomplicated and hardly cost anything. However, they are very personal and beautiful gestures.

10 Ideas for Small Surprises for Friends

1. A Handwritten Letter in Your Most Beautiful Handwriting

Nowadays, people hardly ever write letters by hand on paper. That makes a handwritten letter all the more meaningful, and one in your most beautiful handwriting, on fine paper and decorated with small drawings or ornaments. A particularly lovingly designed handwritten letter already shows on the outside that you attach special value to its content.

A beautiful way to tell a friend how much they mean to you, to thank them for their support or to apologise.

2. A Photo Album With Shared Memories

Write a funny remark, an insider’s note or tell the story of your friendship with the photos and continuous sentences under each photo.

3. Make a Community Collage of Photos, Drawings and Sayings

Get your circle of friends together and create a collage from photos, drawings and sayings. This is also a nice farewell gift, for example, when a friend moves to another city or goes away for a longer period of time.

4. A Surprise Picnic, Breakfast or Barbecue

Surprise your friend with a little culinary special. Find out when she/he has nothing else planned. Shop and prepare everything for a really great picnic, barbecue, champagne breakfast or pancake feast. Invite your friend for a coffee and… Surprise: there’s something even better!

5. A Homemade Friendship Doll

If you like crafting you can make yourself, your friend or both of you as a doll and have one hell of a unique and personal surprise for him or her!

Whether you make the doll out of fabric scraps, old nylon stockings, ping pong or tennis balls and fill it with modelling clay, straw or cotton wool is entirely up to your creativity and taste. There are numerous instructions on YouTube on how to make a doll yourself, which you can then of course design individually.

Here, for example, are instructions for a Waldorf doll:

6. A Self-Drawn Comic Strip About Your Friendship

Recount with a few drawings and speech bubbles… …how you met… …a funny experience you had together… …a fantasy story starring you… …how you feel and what you want to say to your friend… …or whatever else comes to mind.

Even if you’re not a born drawer (at least that’s how I feel), a friendship comic like this can be pretty funny and is definitely well received.

7. A T-Shirt With a Personalised Design

Print a plain T-shirt with your personal friendship motif. This can be a funny edited photo of the two of you, a self-painted picture, an insider from a TV series or movie, or a handwritten message.

8. A Homemade and Personally Decorated Cake

As a good friend, you know what your friends like and what they are particularly interested in. For example, for the chocolate-loving Star Wars fan, bake a chocolate cake with the message in icing: May the Force be with you!.

Or you can write the first notes of his favourite song with food colouring on the apple cake he loves so much for your musician friend…

9. A Funny Insider Gift That Reminds You of Something You Experienced Together

An insider gift can be anything, including something trashy or absurd, but that has a special meaning for you.

For example: a Simpsons coaster with Krusty the Clown, because you used to watch the show together as students and Krusty reminded you of your crazy maths teacher.

Or: a box in the shape of a turtle, because you used to live together in a flat-share and your plan, which never materialised, was always to keep a turtle as a pet.

10. A Hidden Message: e.g. In a Message in a Bottle

Write a secret message on a piece of paper and hide it in a place where your friend will eventually discover it. For example, roll up the note and put it in an empty glass bottle from which you have removed the label. You then place this bottle in a place where your friend will stumble across it: the desk, the handbag or even the window sill.

Either the message is already the surprise itself, e.g. the handwritten letter, or it contains a hint about what the surprise contains. If you have time and are creative, you can even turn it into a little scavenger hunt, where a chain of clues and hidden messages eventually leads your friend to the final surprise.

On our portal for leisure ideas you will not only find many more tips for gifts for friends, but also for activities with friends, activities for two or activities with children.

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