The gift I'm thinking of is a pair of good walking boots that I gave my father when he retired last year. I'm a thirty-four-year-old dentist in Karachi, and he'd worked for thirty-five years as a clerk in a government office.
My father isn't an easy person to buy for. He always says he doesn't need anything, and if you buy him clothes he puts them in a drawer and keeps wearing his old ones. So I knew I had to find something that matched his plans rather than his wardrobe.
I chose the boots because, a few months before he retired, he told me that he wanted to start walking every morning, and that one day he hoped to visit the northern areas of Pakistan and walk in the mountains, which he'd always dreamed of but never had time for. I noticed he was wearing worn-out office shoes for his morning walks, and his feet were hurting. So I went to a proper outdoor shop, explained his size and his problem, and bought boots with good support.
I think he loved them for two reasons. The practical reason is that his feet stopped hurting, and he started walking longer and longer distances. But the bigger reason, I think, was that the gift showed I'd actually listened to him. It told him I took his retirement plans seriously, not just as a joke. He wore them out of the box the same evening. And in the summer, the two of us went to the mountains in Hunza and walked for a week. He wore those boots every day, and he still calls them his lucky boots.