The final few days are for anything local. If you have left it late, a share bag or a boxed selection picked up in person still reads as considered, particularly when the day itself is spent in company.

What lifts either option above the usual is the finish. The chocolates are handcrafted in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, where Mary Ann O'Brien founded the company in 1992, and that shows in the way each piece is finished rather than simply moulded. A single-origin dark or a hand-finished praline carries more weight in the hand than a foil coin, even at stocking-filler size.

None of this rules roses out entirely. If your partner loves flowers, buy the flowers. But if you want a gift that lasts past the week, suits their taste and does not look like everyone else's, a chocolate collection gift box collection is the stronger choice, on its own or alongside a smaller bunch.

Knowing the date is only half the job. The other half is working backwards from it so a gift arrives in good time rather than the Saturday morning after. A short countdown makes that easier.

There is also the question of who the gift is for. A young family is well served by a mixed hamper that has something for every age at the table. A couple might prefer a smaller boxed selection built around darker, single-origin cocoa. A colleague or a neighbour you want to thank sits comfortably with a share bag of individually wrapped pieces, easy to leave on a desk or hand over at the door.

For corporate relationships specifically, January offers a genuinely useful alternative to piling every gesture into the same crowded December window. A client thank you sent in January, rather than lost among a dozen other Christmas parcels arriving the same week, stands out simply through timing. It also gives a natural opening to mark a specific piece of work from the previous year, a contract renewed, a project completed, rather than a generic seasonal gesture that could apply to any client on the list.