The Young and The Restless | Tongue-kissed by a giraffe

But if I’m honest, the tongue contact was pretty gross.

While animals in zoos aren’t as feral as they are in the wild, with their access to regular medical checks and dental examinations, quality nutritionally balanced food they don’t have to hunt or forage for themselves and adequate warmth and cooling for whatever the current climate, they’re still, essentially, big smelly game animals.

A giraffe’s tongue could still strip the foliage and bark off any branch, and it’s still long enough to wrap the whole way around one.

Am I painting a detailed enough picture here?

Like so many things when you’re a parent, just when you think you’ve worked something out or gotten something under control, a new stage or phase upsets the whole equilibrium.

Gift buying has been easy for the most part of my children’s lives.

When they were born, their gifts included clothes and soft toys, overhead play gyms and teething rattles.

When they were toddlers, it was all manner of brightly coloured toys that, when touched, activated lights and hideous sounds.

Mine then moved into a sports stage.

Gifts became basketball rings and soccer goals, bikes and scooters.

Then came the expensive stage — electronics — PlayStations and iPads, iPhones and AirPods.

After that, around 13 and 14, there was a lull.

None of them could or would give me any present ideas when their birthdays or Christmas approached.

My eldest has come through that now he has a car and is learning a trade.

The water main has burst wide open and I’ve tapped right into a new source of gift ideas: car accessories and tools of his trade — the wishlist is endless.

But in the meantime, gift ideas still escape me for his brothers.

I’m not generally a fan of buying generic gifts such as shaving cream and socks, however practical they might be.

I don’t even like buying vouchers, even though most of us love an opportunity to choose our own gifts.

I just feel lazy when I do it. I try to choose something that suits the recipient.

People often buy things for others that they’d like to receive themselves.

That might be why my go-to idea when I struggle to think of anything for someone is an experience of some kind; because I, personally, get more joy out of experiences than things.

I’ve bought people tickets to concerts and live theatre shows, smash rooms and abseiling courses, ghost tours and Tiger Moth flights, simulators, tastings and entries into running festivals.

The giraffe who licked me upside the face was part of an experience-based gift I was given.

It was a giraffe-feeding animal encounter at Melbourne Zoo on my birthday a few years ago.

The keeper had instructed me to hold lettuce in my hands to feed a pair of them, but when one of the giraffes walked away, she suggested I put the lettuce in my mouth to feed the one who remained, named Nikiri.

And that is how the giraffe’s tongue came into contact with my lips.

Animal encounters make great gifts for kids.

The first reason is that you can buy just one experience for the birthday child, making it a more affordable exercise than forking out for the whole family.

The giraffe encounter I had was only $50 at the time (on top of a ticket into the zoo).

It is a cheap experience, but if you have to multiply it by four of you, it gets expensive quickly.

That particular experience has risen to $91 in just a few years, so you can imagine the tally to shout the whole family now.

However, a few years ago, when we spent a Christmas in Halls Gap, exploring the Grampians, all of the kids got an animal encounter in their gift haul.

Not wanting to lug loads of bulky presents to our destination in the car on top of all our regular luggage, combined with the fear of the kids spotting said gifts (especially seeing as it was before a percentage of my children knew the truth about Christmas’s mascot), these made great gifts; especially because we were headed to Halls Gap Zoo on Boxing Day.

I chose meerkats for my eldest, who was quite gentle at the time, a python for my middle child because he’s the bravest of us all and a lizard for my little one because his age had restricted him from anything else.

It was such an easy gift to decide on, purchase and transport.

The kids got to use their presents almost immediately and the (included) digital souvenir photos that came through after we’d returned home from our holiday extended their enjoyment as they reminisced about it.

If their gifts had been animatronic meerkats, jointed wooden pythons and window-clinging stretchy lizards, they probably would have been binned or donated and forgotten about a long time ago.

Instead, because the gift wasn’t tangible to begin with, the memory from the experience, while brief, is endless, and the photos, priceless.

The fee also helps to support zoos’ important conservation programs.

If you’re ever stuck for a stocking filler, I highly encourage you to stick an experience in Santa’s sack.