With the seconds ticking away toward Christmas, the festive mood is definitely with us and everyone has started thinking about gift ideas.

When it comes to gifts, you can’t go wrong with a nicely-designed calendar, which can be a great decoration in your home, and also helps you to keep up with upcoming appointments and stay organized through the year. Check our recommendations below to see what’s on trend.

Photodarium Calendar

Available on Taobao; RMB 265; RMB 8 for shipping

The Photodarium Calendar features 365 exquisite, high-quality reproductions of photographs by 24 photographers from different countries, carefully selected from the works submitted to the annual Polaroid photograph competition initiated by Germany-based magazine Slanted. Each of the photos comes with a short biography of the photographer, as well as information about the background to the shoot. Each page can be torn off and kept as a postcard or bookmark, or even framed as an elegant addition to your wall.

Art Page-A-Day Gallery Calendar

Available on Amazon and Taobao; RMB 108; free shipping

It’s like an art gallery on your the desktop, with a year of stunningly curated fine art and design works, capturing rich color and fine detail to give you a close appreciation of the masterpieces. Featured works range from surreal cityscapes to portraits, from the early Roman period to Renaissance classics, from Vermeer to Botticelli. It was a complete sell out last year so you definitely don’t want to miss out on this one.

故宫日历 Calendar of the Forbidden City

Available on Amazon and Taobao; RMB 50; free shipping

Its calendar has been one of the most popular souvenirs from the Forbidden City Museum since 2010, seven decades after the first calendar of its kind was launched in 1933. It features works from the museum’s collections, and combines them with other traditional Chinese cultural elements including the animal zodiac, the 24 solar terms, and Chinese festivals. It’s nicely designed with some room at the bottom for recording appointments and other daily events. With a budget of only RMB 50, this is a sweet buy indeed.

豆瓣电影日历 Douban Movie Calendar

Available on Taobao; RMB 85; free shipping

This would be a great gift for movie lovers. Each page features a movie that is highly recommended by critics on Douban, a website exclusively for sharing music and movies. Each page comes with a screenshot and a short line excerpted from the featured movie, which includes classic and recently released films from China and the rest of the world.

Himekuri Mini Calendar

Available on Taobao; RMB 130; free shipping

Launched by Himekuri Stationary, the calendar stands out for its ingenious design, being only 21cm wide and 5cm high respectively. The calendar presents different series of colorful scenes created by the illustrator Mao Hagihara, and each one can be used as a post-it note in your journal, book, or anywhere you want to identify the date.

Photos: Taobao.com

In our technically developed times we can’t imagine life without gadgets anymore. Even though Beijing restriction policy makes it hard to access Facebook and the phrase “Google it” would be more fair to be changed to “bing it”, still we can’t make a step without phone-in-hand.

App developers were the first who understood the phone’s integration into life, and there is wide variety of family-oriented apps that would lighten life for Beijingers.

Family Organizer

This is the app that brings together all your family plans in one place: from hiking to the Great Wall to grocery shopping at Apple Gourmet to the dumplings recipe you tapped out while talking to friends. So far, the creators of Family Organizer offer sharing calendar, to-do list, journal, shopping, recipes, and photos. All the reviews say that it’s almost perfect – however, there’s no feature for sharing the app across devises, which makes it a bit uncompleted. Free, available in the app store and Google play.

Mom’s Daily Planner App

This is the app from another developer but with pretty similar features. The app is designed in pink colors, making it look pretty nice and appealing to those inclined to the color. One of the pros of Mom’s Daily Planner App is that it connects to Wallet, enabling you to plan and manage your budget with simply organized pictures. For an extra $5.99 in the app store you can get access to some premium features – such as sharing it with other devices.

Cozi Family Organizer

This one recently got a lot of awards, as the system enables to share all important information within your family circle. This way you can always put an alert for your child, to, for example, wear a mask if the pollution level will get too high, or correct the items in lists in real-time – which is really practical. The notification and online editing features make this app outstanding. The sour spoon here is that the subscription for this app will cost $19.99 to $29.99 on app store and Google play markets.

Hub Family Organizer

In the Hub, you can add events to a sharing calendar, so that none of you will forget about city or school events and project deadlines. Hub Family Organizer also has a chat for family members and a photo section. The design comes in a simple and blue design, reminiscent of careless non-VPN days. The app is not free: subscription will cost $4.99 per month or $49.99 for a year. Find it in the app store and Google play.

Family Calendar

This app looks pretty much like all the above: syncing to-do lists, calendars and grocery plans. However, the minimalistic white design and no extra cost features make it one of our favorites. All family photos from the Forbidden City and the World Park walks can be kept together, and even if one of you will occasionally loose pictures or an important note, it’d always be available from another device. App store and Google play both have available downloads.

Checklist Parent: Mom and Dad Family Calendar

The idea of this app is a bit different from all others: it is dedicated to help parents find some free time just for themselves. Here you can find ready to-do lists and just try to follow them, noticing by the same time (as the developers say) how your own life becomes more colorful and organized. There are ready plans for many family-related occasions, such as travel packing, birthday celebration, cleaning, or even baby showers, which should definitely save some time and nerves. These list will cost $0.99-5.99 each though from the app store.

Photos: kirov-portal.ru; app store.