Sure, everyone loves the giant Home Depot skeleton but where is the love for the giant Home Depot crab? I refuse to check the specifications to see if this is giant for a crab or a truly giant crab so imagine something between two and seven feet.
If you can’t afford the giant crab, take your kids to see someone else’s giant crab and as a souvenir, buy them this lobster lego ripoff (they’re young, don’t tell them there’s a difference between this brand and Legos or lobster and crabs).
For a mere $120, you could give someone the gift of a painting upon which a 30 year old Harlequin romance based its cover! By artist Tony Meers, these are selling fast so get in before your only choice is Daddy Trouble.
The postal service has a surprisingly great gift shop. The kids may enjoy a mail truck or a tent to play post office while the adults will look hot in a crop top or maybe one of the limited edition hip hop stamp shirts.
Or, you know, buy some fucking stamps. The ones celebrating the centennial of Peanuts are very cute, and they come with a special offer where if you attach them to a piece of paper the post office will actually deliver that paper to anyone in the country! Remind your friends you exist in corporeal form!
What if you want to show your respectful admiration for government services on the local level? For a mere $159 (sale price), you too could own a little board that lights up to show you where the trains of the MBTA are in real time. Maybe other cities have this too, I don’t know. Check!
(If the lights don’t move, your board is probably not broken, the T is.)
If you don’t live near the MBTA, see if your subway system is one that this guy turned into a dragon.
I don’t know what Pentiment is about but I know that it takes place in the 1500s and that the artwork places you inside an illuminated manuscript and that is frankly all I need to know. Okay, I do know two more things: it’s a mystery game, so I assume you’re playing the medieval Jessica Fletcher, and you can pet the dog.
Or try Trombone Champ - “the world’s first trombone-based rhythm game”! I think we’ve all been waiting for this one! They don’t make Trombone Champ for any system I own yet I am still tempted to buy it because the videos of people playing it have given me so much joy.
The beauty of the game is no one plays it well and the trombone is an objectively funny instrument to play badly, so win or lose, you will have fun.
I’ve spent a troubling portion of my life looking for a good food gift and I’m always disappointed. Fruit baskets are so expensive and the fruit is not that good, or it’s fine but you’re paying extra against your will for the stale shortbread they insist on throwing in. People love the Harry and David pears, but I wonder if those people never eat pears because frankly they just taste like pears to me. Alcohol is tricky because your recipient might not drink (I may be getting old but this seems to increasingly be the case) plus if you’re mailing it, shipping laws vary by state. Bakery items are hit or miss. What is the solution?
Imagine the face of your friend or relative when they rip the wrapping paper off a box to find six cartons of pistachio milk inside!
Some of you are probably right now insulting me by insinuating I came up with this idea at 3:30 AM while experiencing my fourth straight night of insomnia, and that a carton of nut milk is not really a gift that a recipient would be grateful to receive. But was it Harry or David who once had the nerve to stand before a board of directors and say “six pears”? Doesn’t six cartons sound better? If it doesn’t feel like enough to you, maybe casually “forget” to take the price off the box. Pistachios must kick like mules when you milk them because this stuff is expensive! Talk about a luxury item! Or include some hot chocolate mix and a couple of mugs! I was going to make that suggestion to preempt complaints anyway but I see that Táche is on the same page. For the low, low price of $75, they’ll do it for you! (Mugs not included.)
If your giftee doesn’t drink liquids, get a sophisticated nut butter tasting flight. Holiday flavors! Comes with spoon! Or if they have a nut allergy, there is premium oat milk, a gift so popular that Oatmilk’s Barista 6 pack has already sold out. Try the oat milk lattes from La Colombe (12 packs come in flavors like Peppermint Mocha or Salted Caramel).
And if you’re feeling really fancy, you can always milk your own with the $325 Almond Cow starter pack which provides nut, coconut, and oat options. Give the set to a friend or buy it for yourself and snobbily present them with homemade nut milk.
Regular crayons are annoyingly devoid of nutritional value. Mizuiro crayons come in two varieties: vegetable and rice. Jokes aside, the crayons are made with food waste and for every purchase, the company plants a tree.
Are these TikTok faves? I’m not young enough to know. They are beautiful and come in a variety of flavors though. The gemmies look like a good starter while pieces of bling is a little more high end. Watch out also for the sugar-free, low carb candy shaped like beautiful crystals. If these are already sold out, there are more expensive (and also gorgeous) sets here OR get a kit and grow your own!
Did you ever wish sudoku contained actual math? Is your brain an unquiet spirit and you’d like to drown out its lamentations with multiplication? Have you been looking for a reason to accidentally memorize every number divisible by 7? KenKen is for you!
I wish there was a subscription option for these little puzzle books because they are as necessary to my everyday life as air. The best books are in this series but newbies might want to start with any of the Will Shortz books which have easier puzzles.
Shapeways is a 3D printing service that offers the ability to 3D print your own designs and the ability to buy other people’s 3D prints off of their marketplace. I still tend to think plastic when people talk about 3D printing, but what’s cool about Shapeways is they offer lots of materials, including precious metals. I’ve had gold and silver pendants of my own design printed here. Well, I had to have someone else do the design part for me because I have the spatial reasoning of a Pong girl living in a Tron world, but they came out great and it’s really reasonably priced.
You can also buy other people’s designs. They do tend to skew nerdy, like the Final Fantasy ring or Zelda’s lullaby ring, but there are hundreds of pages of options in jewelry alone. There’s also home decor or kitchen stuff.
I guess you upload a picture to put in the pendant part of the necklace and then if you hold it up to the light, it projects. So like a viewmaster but make it fashion. Is that anything?
I don’t mess around with charger cords under 10 feet. If I couldn’t tie up a Scooby Doo villain with them, I’m not interested. Unfortunately, no matter what brand I buy, within the year they begin the same seductive dance, coyly shedding their outer covering to reveal the inner wires. I don’t wish to kink shame and it’s possible my bedroom contains some aphrodisiac that drives them wild, but there’s only so long you can use a cord with exposed wires, even patched up with electrical tape. So I would love just a fistful of these guys, like a bouquet of them, tied up with yet another cord.
Chestnuts are a part of my holiday celebrations, and I would love to get American ones, but that’s impossible because in the early 1900s, a blight wiped out 3.5 billion American chestnut trees, making them virtually extinct on this continent. I’m pretty obsessed with this fact and also with the fact that the America Chestnut Foundation has been working for years to bring them back and has had some success. So many ecological stories are ones of disaster and loss; the ACF might actually be able to restore something that was once so important to the local biosphere. This is biologically and culturally important and hopeful too!1
Have you ever noticed that while the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin went blasting his name on the streets, she never mentioned what her own was? Probably the tenth Hilda born into her village that month and she knew, she fully knew, that any mischief she got up to, she could easily pass off onto some other Hilda down the way.
As a person with a unique name, I am fully on Rumpelstiltskin’s side. I don’t want my name out there either but with the internet, I am haunted by every dumb thing I’ve ever done and some of the smart things too. A quote I gave to a student newspaper in college, a professional org I once had to join, even a guestbook comment on a Winnie the Pooh fan page when I was 8, which I had to email the webmaster to take down when I reached the age of majority because it was coming up on page one of my google results and I was trying to get a job.
Two people I have dated share names with a Time Magazine Person of the Year and a character from an American literature classic, respectively, and they sleep the dreamless sleep of the ungoogleable. If either of them committed a triple homicide, they still wouldn’t crack page 5 of their google results. I would kill to have that kind of anonymity.
I sometimes see new parents going to great lengths to choose unique names for their children, to which I say: why? The greatest gift you could give a child is the most generic name you can think of; the greatest gift you can give an adult is a subscription to an internet privacy service that deletes your name and address from search results. If I can’t take down those newspaper articles, at least I can make sure they don’t show up next to twenty results confirming my current location.
Scrivener is a word processor/organizer/magical program for the writer in your life. I have used it for academic papers, professional research projects, and write this newsletter (and every newsletter!) on it. I have no jokes for this, I just highly recommend it.
You probably have a friend who wishes they were a homesteader. Half the time this friend lives in a city apartment and the most they can do to fulfill that fantasy is brew their own beer and maybe keep bees, which drives their 30 closest neighbors wild. I would embrace my personal chicken theology and make this friend a print of either the “Destroy this man” chicken (sorry I don’t know who made this meme) (truly sorry because I love it) or the beloved Our Lady of Chickens:
If this friend instead lives in the suburbs and (against my advice) has a lawn, you should rent them a goat to cut their grass. Goats are very cute and I think it would be fun. Google to see what’s local to you. This service is in California, here’s one in MA, now you go!
If they are such a homesteader that they have a pollinator garden instead of grass, find a goat yoga near you instead. Go all in on goats this year.
Share your photos. If you’re old enough that your early years were memorialized on print photographs and not digital, share these photos. Scan them and send them. Do you have aunts and uncles in your photos? Adorable cousins? Beloved grandparents who have now passed? SHARE THESE PHOTOS. People may be in them who are outside your immediate sphere and they would really like to see them! Print versions, emailed, a slideshow, just show them to the people who are in them. If I could get this as a gift, I would ask for nothing else ever.
Share your digital photos too, especially if you don’t have social media or you never post because you don’t like how you look. Make your friend or relative promise not to post them anywhere (and don’t share with people you don’t trust to hold to this) and give them to them, because someday you will be dead and they will miss you and vice versa.
For $50, the New York Public Library will print a custom message on a bookplate in a circulating book! Be a part of the library! This is so cool.
This is the best gift in the guide but it will take careful planning to maximize the enjoyment while not messing up someone's entire day.
First step, plan something annoying to do with someone. It shouldn’t be tickets to a concert by an artist they love, and it shouldn’t be a casual walk around town or running errands together. You’re looking for something where you’re going to spend more time getting ready and getting there and back than actually spending time together. Maybe suggest drinks in a bar inconveniently located to them but also tell them you have other plans after so can’t stay long. Or something where you’re technically going to be physically together but the amount of actual time you will spend talking is minimal, like asking them to come with you to your cousin’s one man show. Something where you have the obligation of going out but none of the enjoyment of spending time together.
Then find the best time to cancel. The sweet spot is going to vary by person. For me, it’s morning of because it leaves enough time that I can spend hours in gratitude that I no longer have to go do the thing, but this may vary if they have childcare needs for example. You don’t want to leave them stranded after they’ve scrambled to find a babysitter.
Now call up and tell them you can’t make it and then share in the waves of euphoria they’re experiencing. They don’t have to find an outfit; they don’t have to catch the bus to the train; their entire evening in pajamas now stretches out before them to do whatever they want.
Congratulations! You have literally given someone the gift of time. You are as a god.
I guess I should caveat this that some people are not okay with the fact that one solution is genetically modifying the tree. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3747170-that-new-chestnut-usda-plans-to-allow-the-release-of-ge-trees-into-wild-forests/ Do your research on this before donating.