The Best Gifts to Give This Year
Gifts that ain’t no thing.
We’ve been beating the fewer-things drum for a while, so—surprise, surprise—we’re definitely of the mindset that adding to someone’s pile is no gift at all. Ideally, our gifts should find themselves immediately at home because they get used and treasured. Last year, we concentrated our gifting prowess for our near & dear on “something they want, something they need, something to wear and something to read.” The key there is the usability—with extra credit if you immediately think of gifting yourself the same thing. We would like to continue to expand your gifting horizons by offering up some non-obvious (read: not basic) ideas to win you bestgiftever praise.
Party on.
A favorite gift we used the hell out of? These cocktail napkins, personalized with our names and a lucky horseshoe. They were not only oh-so useful as we cocktailed, but also made us feel like proper grown-ups. We’re just guessing: Since many of us have relocated our nests and now that we have the greenlight from the CDC (thank you, vaccines), our desire to host others will be on the rise—once again creating the need for such social accoutrements.
Draw delight.
We’ve been gifting custom illustrations from Annika Uden for a while now, much to the delight of our giftees. Working from inspo photos, Annika creates minimalistic, dreamy illustrations in the colors (or, say, a favorite Star Wars scene) of your choice. With the receipt of Annika’s digital files, you can easily upload to Framebridge for the finished product, and also turn over the file to the giftee for future use. You can reach Annika at annikakristinuden@gmail.com
Class things up.
Despite the endless advertisements and the many parodies, we have been enjoying the heck out of our Masterclass subscriptions we received last year. We like toggling between those classes that promote doing, like creating amazing dishes from Yotam Ottolenghi, and those that are transferring a deeper learning, like the science of sleep from Matthew Walker. New classes are frequently added—so it’s actually the gift that keeps on giving.
Extend an olive branch.
Whether your favorite folks have been bingeing Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy or fighting for a greener future, gifting them their own olive tree from Nudo’s adoption program is sure to portend some peace. In addition to getting their adoption papers, picking their grove and learning about their farmer, your giftee will receive four separate shipments of olive oil. A gifting win never tasted so good.
Make winter a wonderland.
We’ve been buying from Farmgirl Flowers forever. Beyond their gorgeous bouquets, we just feel good about their direct support of local growers. After choosing a bouquet, you can now choose to make it a subscription by selecting a start date, a frequency and an end date. Our plan is to schedule deliveries for December, January and February to ensure that those blooms arrive to brighten dark Winter days and hint to the Spring ahead.
Rev up their roadtrip.
One thing we expect to keep in practice post-pandemic is the joy of the roadtrip and house rentals. And we plan to gift at least a portion of said rentals with an Airbnb gift card. Whether they want to wander to a luxe rental or one of the many places that their newly acquired pandemic pooch will be welcome, we suspect this gift card won’t sit around. Hate the idea of handing over a plastic card? Pair it with this Smythson notebook to capture their travel-inspired musings.
