Personalised Christmas Reveal Tickets: Ideas for a Big Surprise

There is a moment on Christmas morning when the big present cannot be wrapped. A trip, a concert, a driving course, a day out in February. You end up writing it on a folded piece of paper, and it lands with a bit of a thud.

A reveal ticket fixes that. It is a foiled card with a scratch panel over the surprise. The reveal takes about ten seconds, everyone watches, and afterwards the ticket goes on the mantelpiece rather than in the recycling.

We make these by hand in our studio in Hessle. Here are the Christmas ones, and what each is for.

1. The Christmas Scratch Reveal Ticket, £10

This is the general purpose one, and it is in our best sellers. It works for any surprise, because you write the reveal yourself.

You fill in four things: a ticket title along the top, the name on the ticket, a message along the bottom, and the scratch reveal text. The reveal text is the payoff, so it is worth a minute of thought. Our own example for the message field is "To the best Husband in the world. Have a great Christmas love Ellie xxx", which gives you the tone. You also pick the foil and whether the scratch sticker is silver or gold. See the Christmas Scratch Reveal Ticket.

2. The Christmas Reveal Ticket Bow, £10

Same idea, different design. This one has a glitter foil bow and border across the card, and the same four fields plus the foil colour. If the reveal has a bit of ceremony to it, an anniversary trip or a first holiday together, the Christmas Reveal Ticket Bow is the one we would point you at.

3. The Lapland ticket, with the date under the panel, £10

If the surprise is a Lapland trip, this is the one. The design has snowflakes and sleigh silhouettes, and the scratch panel hides the travel date, so the child scratches off a circle and finds the day they are going.

The reveal here is a proper date field rather than free text, so you pick the travel date and we set it. You add the name, the foil, the card colour (white, black or navy), the sticker colour and a short message. Our own suggestion for that message is "from Mummy & Daddy", which tells you how much room there is. The Lapland foiled ticket is one we make a lot of in October.

4. The Polar Express ticket, £10

This one is our own design, inspired by the idea of a train to the North Pole. It is not official merchandise and we make no claim to be connected to the film or the book.

There is no scratch panel on this one. You fill in passenger names, a departure date, a departure time and a train station, and it reads as a real ticket. Parents use it as a Christmas Eve box item rather than as a reveal for a big gift. It is in our best sellers too. See the Polar Express foiled gift ticket.

5. The boarding pass, for a trip you are announcing, £10

Not strictly a Christmas design, but bought at Christmas more than at any other time. The personalised foiled boarding pass is laid out like a real one, with destination, airports, passenger names, date, boarding time and duration filled in by you. A slower reveal than a scratch panel, and it suits adults better than children.

What people actually hide under the panel

Reveal tickets are not only for holidays. Most of the scratch text we are sent is closer to this:

• A concert or a match, with the date under the panel.

• An experience booked for the spring, when there is nothing to put in a box in December.

• Money towards a first car or a deposit, where an envelope of cash feels flat.

• A pregnancy announcement dressed up as a Christmas present.

• A pet, which is the one that makes people cry.

The panel is small, so short wins. Four or five words reads better than a sentence.

Foils, card colours and envelopes

All five tickets are £10 and come with a plain white envelope. A coloured envelope is £1 more, in black, white, green, blue, red, pink, gold or silver.

Gold metallic and gold holographic are the foils we send out most, but there is fire red metallic, green glass, copper glitter, blue holographic and black glitter among others.

One honest warning, and it is on the product pages too: dark foils do not stand out well on a black card. Black glitter on black looks subtle in the studio and almost invisible under a tree.

Card colour (white, black or navy) is an option on the Lapland and Polar Express tickets only. The Christmas scratch ticket and the bow ticket come in their own fixed design.

How we make them, and what to know before you order

Duffy's Creations is the two of us, Lee and Sam, working from home in Hessle, HU13. Every ticket is foiled by hand here, which is why the foil sits slightly raised when you run a finger over it. We wrote about how that works in foil versus standard prints.

Nothing gets printed until you have seen a proof. We send the artwork over with your names, dates and reveal text in place, and we wait for a yes. Check the spellings then, because once it is foiled it is foiled. Which leads to the thing we would rather say plainly than bury in a policy page: personalised items cannot be returned if you change your mind.

Order earlier in the season than you think you need to. Not because of any cut off we are quoting here, but because December is when the proof emails pile up, and a reply that takes two days is two days we are not printing.

Where to start

If you only want one, take the Christmas Scratch Reveal Ticket. It covers every surprise and the reveal text is yours. If the surprise is Lapland, take the Lapland one. If you want a train ticket for a Christmas Eve box, take the Polar Express.

The rest of the range, including the concert, theatre and driving lesson tickets, sits in foiled tickets, and the wider festive range is in Christmas. A letter from Santa alongside a ticket makes a proper Christmas Eve set for younger children, and if the reveal is a gig, our concert and theatre ticket keepsakes are the version they keep afterwards.