Give: 2008

Ask any of my oldest friends: I'm probably one of the worst gift-givers in the history of giving gifts. For birthdays, I buy people drinks, or give them money towards a camera they were probably going to buy anyway. For Christmas, my standard gift is a CD of my favorite songs of the year (though in years past, the sleeves painstakingly sewn from handmade paper were a thing of universal envy). Therefore, I should probably leave the gift-giving advice to people who know what they're doing. But since compiling a list of places to shop a few years back, I've come across so much good stuff perfect for gift-giving that I just had to share. Because I think it's possible I might have actually got something very right this time.

Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned Rock Operas
The best thing I did this year was to decide on one fine chilly Wednesday night in March to make the trek to Brooklyn for Cringe. Not only did I meet one of my favorite new people in the world, but I was gifted with a preview of the only book this year that made me laugh out loud multiple times. I highly recommend that you buy one of these for each of your best friends in high school. Just to remind them of the time you once thought a guy with a purple streak in the front of his hair was hotter than all get out, and you wrote poems about him that you read out loud, and they rolled their eyes at you but let you talk about it anyway.

ION uRecord Vinyl & Cassette Ripper and Pinnacle Video Capture
We've been talking about digitizing our record, cassette, and videocassette collections for ages, and have yet to do something about it. That video of the trip I took to Latvia in 2002 is festering somewhere in a drawer in our coffee table, and it's killing me. And let's not forget the mix tape J made me in 1998, featuring a broken record player attempting to play "Walk, Don't Run" before begging J to actually spin the record for it. This will probably fall under the "sewing machine" category of things I keep promising to buy, then bail out moments before actual purchase. But that doesn't mean you can't give the gift of transfer to someone else.

Kiehl's Ultimate Strength Hand Salve
I work with paper all day, and a tube of this stuff has become absolutely indispensable. Without it, I get these horrible dry fingers, like I have tiny paper cuts on the tips of each of my fingers, and I'm incapable of touching any synthetic material. Don't you want your nearest and dearest to be able to touch synthetic materials?

Areo Matches
My secret superpower is procuring matchbooks from restaurants. Slide two in one hand, and elbow your husband to pick up a few extra. Everyone needs matches, but now that most restaurants are non-smoking, the matches have magically turned into toothpicks. Boring. Make someone's bathroom ledge beautiful again. (via Mighty Haus)

Blue Bottle Coffee: Bella Donovan and Victrola Coffee: Ethiopian Yirgacheffe
I have dreams of these two coffees being brought to me in bed every morning by a manservant who looks like a cross between the student teacher from my high school art class and Stephen Malkmus. To me, these coffees both represent amazing trips I took in recent years (San Francisco and Seattle respectively). To anyone else, they'll represent damn fine coffee.

Castoro Cellars Zinfandel 2005 Paso Robles
The Husband and I had our first taste of this wine when we settled into a meal at a little roadside cafe in Big Sur after a beautiful drive along Highway 1. The quality of this wine may have changed since first we drank it more than a year ago — a little sweet, as I recall, but that's the way I like it — but the memory hasn't. Plus, it's under $15 a bottle.

Colston Bassett Stilton
To go with your wine, the Crack of Cheese (or "King of Cheese," as the company prefers). I spend more money on this cheese than is prudent to admit in these dire economic times, but have you tasted it? Have you?

Danish dishbrush
It's no secret how much I love my little dishbrush. Not everyone will understand why you've chosen to put a ribbon around a grey dishbrush and slip it in their stocking, but they will think of you every time you've saved their pretty little hands from getting puckered while doing the dishes.

A dozen chicks
On the few occasions I have decided to extend my gift-giving beyond drinks and mix CDs in the past, Oxfam Unwrapped is my first stop. It can feel silly spending money on stocking stuffers when there are still people around the world without stockings. After you've given the economy a little boost, why not buy someone in need a dozen chicks with the change?

(And, don't forget that books — particularly those purchase from independent booksellers — always make great gifts. But you already knew that, didn't you?)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.