I used to dread buying holiday gifts, even though I desperately love to shop and I consider gifting, at its most purposeful, to be both an art form and a love language. I should, in theory, enjoy any excuse to paw through racks—or, in the case of this bizarro year, click through tab after tab of wares until I am thirty pages deep into an Etsy search for vintage milk-glass drinkware. But there is something about the twinkliest season and its mandatory merriment that seems to weigh down the task of choosing presents. Each gift must somehow transmit an entire calendar year’s worth of bottled-up sentiment while also serving as a bona fide elicitor of oohs and ahs (or, at least, moving the receiver to fake these noises). For years, the thought of holiday shopping always made me feel a bit (ever)green around the gills.
Then 2020 happened, and everything went sidewise: plans, hopes, livelihoods, gatherings. My own family will be opening our presents over Zoom this year, but we will be gifting sparingly (and donating to food pantries and relief groups in one another’s names). If there are any silver linings to this limited, lonely holiday season, one may be the chance to pause, to reflect, to stop the gifting frenzy that leads thousands of people each year to panic-purchase whiskey stones which will rattle around like loose marbles at the bottom of the freezer for decades to come. Let go of the pressure. Let go of the idea that December is somehow different from any other month—because, let’s face it, your December this year probably looks a lot like November and October did. This time, don’t overthink the gifts. (Even if we wanted to, how many of us even have brainpower left?) Things have been hard enough. Creature comforts are paramount. Few people are wearing hard pants anymore. Just give your loved ones things that they can use now to add small pleasures during a challenging time. Without further ado, and without overthinking it, here are some ideas for those types of things.
The Cadillac of Incense Papers
There is a long-running joke about scented candles and other smelly home goods being the go-to gifts for cousins and co-workers you don’t know too well, or a last-minute present you pull out of a storage closet (see “S.N.L.” ’s “Christmas Candle” sketch), but this is not that. These papers ($24 for a pack of twenty-four), from Ponsont, are sensual, rich, and deeply decadent. They come in two scents: Le Patch (patchouli, benzoin, cedar, tonka, rose, vanilla), which smells like the inside of a cigar lounge crossed with a Gilded Age grande dame, and Rosa Rossa (rose otto, honey, labdanum absolute, frankincense, sandalwood), which is like red rose petals dipped in butter and somehow, also, like the inside of an ancient church. Burning Ponsont papers versus sparking up a generic incense stick from the local hippie emporium is the difference between wearing silk and polyester; each little strip of paper—which you fold up like an accordion, light, blow out, and let smolder—makes the indoors feel luxurious and anointed. The only problem is that these are made in small batches, in Kansas, and sell out almost immediately every time they are back in stock. (As of this writing, they are still available, and the company will roll out new batches throughout the month.)
A Mug for the Hot-Coffee Hard-Liners
I am an all-or-nothing person when it comes to coffee temperature. Piping hot, it is the elixir of the gods; lukewarm, it is gross and unpalatable, meaty and borderline nauseating. I know that there are people out there who love nothing more than a cup of tepid bodega coffee that they nurse all day and allow to go cold before they swill the last drop. But those people are not my people, and we will never understand each other across the great divide. My people are the ones who feel compelled to get up every twenty minutes to nuke their coffee, yet again. If this is you, or someone you know, I have great news: technology is on our side. Last year, my mother-in-law gave me the Ember Mug² ($129.95), a sleek minimalist vaisselle that charges with a coaster using a standard wall plug-in, connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and keeps the liquid inside at whatever temperature you choose (up to a hundred and forty-five degrees). I think it was intended to be a kind of gag gift (insomuch as the very concept of a “smart mug” has a slightly hilarious “Brave Little Toaster” vibe to it). But she unwittingly gave me something that has brought me daily pleasure this year, when basically every morning I find myself sitting at my home desk, with only coffee or tea refills to mark the time.
A Sock Splurge
For a long time, socks as gifts got a bad reputation. (I remember, as a child of the nineties, there was a kind of running threat that, if you misbehaved, all you would get that year would be socks.) But in 2020, when so many people are puttering around their own hallways sans shoes, socks have achieved a sort of hallowed status. Socks also fulfill two crucial gifting criteria: nobody ever has enough, and nobody really wants to buy them for themselves. You could get someone a gift box of Bombas (and Bombas are great!), but if there was ever a time to sock-splurge, it’s this month, this year. Have you ever worn cashmere socks? Your feet feel like they are being personally hugged by a goat. There are Brother Vellies’s Cloud Socks ($35), a super-soft cotton-tube varietal that comes in a rainbow of colors and has a distinctly eighties cool-mall-girl vibe to it, and Wol Hide House Socks ($78), made of nubbly brushed alpaca yarn. I am also partial to Le Bon Shoppe’s cashmere-blend Grandpa Socks ($18), which come in muted nineteen-seventies-kitchen colors and keep the entire calf warm. My cardinal rule for buying someone holiday socks is this: forgo novelty. The pizza-print socks can wait. This is the time for luscious, butter-smooth heel-swaddling.
The Wonders of Nuts.com
I might as well be an unofficial spokeswoman for Nuts.com, which I have pushed on friends this year like I am selling Amway. I do this out of nothing but sheer enthusiasm for the offerings of the Web site, where you can find a bulk bag of dried lentils for under five dollars, every spice and nut and dried fruit under the sun, plus dozens of varieties of trail mix. At the beginning of the pandemic, Nuts.com was the only place that I could reliably find raw beans and good olive oil, and during the really stressful weeks in April, when the sirens wailed throughout the city, I lived on Chocolate Monkey Trail Mix ($6.99 per pound), which I told myself had nutritional value because it contains whole dried bananas (dusted in cocoa powder). My favorite section of the site is the one devoted to chocolate-dipped fruit, and I’m partial, especially, to the candied orange slices ($10.99 for an eight-ounce bag), which combine the gooey, honeyed tang of syrup-soaked citrus with the bitter snap of dark chocolate. You could gift a bag and keep another for yourself.
An Old-Fashioned Banker’s Lamp
Before the pandemic, the New York Public Library was one of my favorite places to work in the city, and since it closed to the public (with the exception of a low-contact lending system) I’ve found myself homesick for the hushed fustiness of the library’s reading rooms, where each carrel is outfitted with a solid, old-school banker lamp. Of course, there are many newfangled, minimalist table lamps out there (and the MoMA Design Store even sells an updated, transparent version of this classic style, for $185), but there is such a pleasing weight to a classic Emeralite model (or an Emeralite-inspired knockoff, as the original banker’s lamps from 1909 are now rare antiques). The opaque green glass provides a suffused, milky glow, and there is something so satisfying about pulling a chain to turn the light on. This lamp feels like sharpened pencils and fresh notebooks. I am sharing this mass-produced version ($91.51), which works in a pinch, but I would also encourage you to trawl eBay and Etsy for vintage versions like this one ($125.25), which has a brass base. Whenever I turn mine on, I feel that it is time to focus, to clear my head, to move more thoughtfully from one hour to the next.
