Gifting looks simple when you look at it from the outside. There is an occasion, you find something appropriate, you wrap it well, and you give it to someone you care about. But the more time we have spent around gifts, children and families, the more we have realised how many interesting questions are hiding inside something we do almost without thinking.

Why do certain occasions still matter to us when so much about the way we live has changed? Why do we spend so much time choosing a gift, but so little time thinking about what happens to it after it is opened? When did keeping a child occupied become one of the things we started looking for in a good children's gift? And why, despite having more things to choose from than ever before, does so much of gifting end up looking exactly the same?

We don't necessarily have neat answers to all of these questions, and that is partly the point. HappyyNest may be a gifting brand, but The Flip Side is where we allow ourselves to look beyond the hamper itself. We write about childhood and how it is changing, Indian rituals and why they survive, screen-free experiences, the way families celebrate, the things the gifting industry gets right and wrong, and the small choices we make without always stopping to ask why.

Some of what we write here will influence what we eventually make at HappyyNest. Some of it probably never will. Sometimes we will have a strong point of view, and sometimes we will simply have a question that we think is worth sitting with for a little longer.

Because behind every gift is a person, an occasion, a relationship and usually a story. The Flip Side is our attempt to think a little more deeply about all of them.