Welcome to this year’s holiday gift guide, also known as the best place to shop for the eaters and readers in your life. This year, if you are so inclined, feel free to leave your best go-to gift idea in the comment section. The author of my favorite one will win a free copy Dinner: A Love Story, Dinner: The Playbook, or How to Celebrate Everything. Your choice! (Winner selected on Monday, December 17 at noon ET.) Happy Holidays Everyone.
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Swirl Baking Dishes (MoMA, $15-$27) Leave it to MoMA to add one-of-a-kind beauty to…a baking dish. The ceramic is hand-swirled, so each one is different. More important: They are oven-to-table and dishwasher safe. (Andy: Are you listening?)
Temporary Tattoos (Tattly, $5-10) Before Phoebe road-tripped for a big cross-country race this past fall, I handed her an envelope that included a you-are-a-badass note and two “Believe” tattoos from Tattly (one for her teammate) that I thought might help shave a few seconds off her splits. (I’ll try anything.) She loved them and now I want to give empowerment tattoos to every kid all the time for any occasion. I also really liked: Let’s Do This, Believe, Self-Confidence, Warrior Not Worrier. That last one is for me. Great for the stocking.
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The Latest Greatest Cookbooks I don’t know about your kids, but mine have this incredible talent for sniffing out a Milk Bar no matter what city we find ourselves in. If yours are the same, they’ll be psyched to open up the neon-lighted All About Cake by Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi ($16). For the friend who knows a little something about cooking, go for Simple the newest Yotam Ottolenghi ($21) and 2018’s best entry in the Everyday genre.
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Flour Sack Dish Towels (Food52, $39 for a set of 4) My mom is a woman who prizes utility over beauty for pretty much any circumstance — When we were growing up, her idea of the perfect gift for my siblings and me were underwear jumbo packs. The good news: I just bought her these flour sack towels, which are both beautiful and useful. The bad news: I love them so much I might have to keep them for myself. They’re part of the cool new Food52 product line that crowd-sources development and design ideas. How fun is that? (NOTE: These are currently out of stock until 12/10; check back then!)
What Do People Do All Day ($11) My editor Maria at the Times Book Review assigned me a round-up on what she called “Big Beautiful Books,” the immersive kind that you imagine (hope? dream? cross-fingers) will suck your kid in for hours at a time on long winter days. You can head over there to find one that works for your kids, but I wanted to make a special plug for the My Big Wimmelbook series, which is great for the 2-to-5-year-old set. Something to note: Wimmelbooks are a standard part of young childhood in Germany and in the review I compared the large-format board-book volumes to the Richard Scarry books we all grew up with. Which made me realize — hey! What about Richard Scarry who will never ever go out of style? Especially the iconic What Do People Do All Day, a favorite when I was a kid. So if you don’t have that one, pick it up first.
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Things I Ate As a Kid Puzzle ($17) A 1000-piece puzzle, via Ben & Birdy, whose gift guide is always a treasure trove of ideas for game lovers.
Homemade Version of a Favorite Store-bought Food. If you’re going in the bake-a-gift direction this year, consider heading down the nostalgia road. My Dad, like all good members of the Bronx post-war Jewish community, loves his Entenmann’s baked goods and passed down that passion to me. I grew up eating their famous, now discontinued, Sour Cream and Nut Chocolate Chip Loaf. A few years ago, I surprised him with a homemade version of it and couldn’t believe how fast it took us back. The recipe, plus more ideas for meaningful food gifts are in my last book, How to Celebrate Everything, on page 19. (Photo credit: Chelsea Cavanaugh for HTCE)
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Pre-assembled Gingerbread House Kit ($50, Dylan’s Candy Bar) A kit that gets straight to the fun part: The decorating.
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Minding the Store, ($13, by Julie Gaines, Illustrated by Ben Lenovitz) Fishs Eddy is a New York institution and I’ve plucked many holiday gifts from its charming shelves through the years. (My in-laws still drink cocktails from the sweet Todd Oldham-Charley Harper-designed glasses we gave them a few years ago.) This year, you should absolutely peruse their online shelves for the goods and the wares, but please also check out the graphic novel written by the Fishs Eddy owner Julie Gaines. It’s all about her wacky family and running a small business — and Catherine Hong, my favorite source for books and design recommended it, so you know it’s going to be good.
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Instant Pot ($70 for 6-quart) Know any hold-outs? (Besides yours truly?) Now that the craze seems to have officially settled into Here to Stay, it might finally be the time.
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Sloth Mug (Urban Outfitters, $15) Wrap it up with your favorite hot chocolate (this one is tops) and a bag of marshmallows and your teenager will love you forever — or at least for, like, 10 minutes.
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Harmonica ($35) The perfect procrastinate-ACT-studying tool. Naturally, my high school junior is obsessed.
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Cheese Knives (CB2, set of 3, $15) For your friend who hosts the best holiday party every year. Or even for the friend who doesn’t.
Fox 8 by George Saunders (Random House $11). For people who like George Saunders (by now you know we sure do!) and for people who have kids who are older than 10 or 11 and are ready for a little darkness to go with their charming animal stories. This one is narrated by a fox (named Fox 8) and beneath the fun misspellings (“reeding my story bak just now, I woslike: O no, my story is a bumer”) and ingenious narration is a powerful story about our lesser angels and our responsibility to the world and our environment. Added bonus: it fits right into a stocking.
In the span of about two hours this past weekend, we planned a five-day trip to Austin, Texas between Christmas and New Years. (As usual, recs welcome!) Only after I told the girls about it, did I realize I missed an opportunity to do the surprise plane-tickets-under-the-tree reveal like Liz did a few years ago. If you still have the time to plan, I’d say go for it.
Other DALS guides through the years:
Gift Guide 2017
Gift Guide 2016
Gift Guide 2015
Gift Guide 2014
Gift Guide 2013
Gift Guide 2012
Gift Guide 2011
UPDATE: The giveaway winner has been notified. Congrats Hannah!
Happy Holidays!
My favorite are those gorgeous cheese knives!
My go to gift this year are sheet masks. They are having such a moment right now, so I figured even the non beauty savvy people on my list will be excited to try. There is so much variety in what they do, plus they are fun for kids and adults. Got lip masks for co-workers, a variety of the full face ones for my cousins and aunts, a gold one for my mom, and bubble masks (that look like superheros masks and animals) for the tweens. Single use, disposable and fun for Instastories.
Last year I made a big batch of Everything Bagel Spice and the year before that I made homemade Vanilla extract. Both went over well, but the vanilla takes a year to brew so you have to think ahead… although it was great to have next years Christmas locked down in January!
Drop Scones w/ different tea pairings.
This year my go-to gift has been a copy of the QUESO! cookbook by Lisa Fain. The history in the cookbook is so interesting and every recipe I’ve tried gets rave reviews. My friends in Texas love receiving it because all anyone here wants to eat is Torchy’s queso, forever; my out-of-state friends love it because there’s no good queso north of the Texas border. A fun inclusion could be some harder-to-find dried chiles to help get their first batch started.
I love your ideas! They are wonderful!! I like to attempt to make something small and easy for gifts as well. For my siblings, I am taking our favorite cookie recipe (that we happen to always have at Christmas) and having the original index card printed on fabric. I have bought one yard of fabric and it will make 4 dish towels to give away…..
My go to holiday gift is homemade scones – I make the scones and freeze them so that friends and neighbors can enjoy hot, homemade scones on Christmas morning. In lieu of baking, I just place the cookie sheet in the freezer. Once they freeze up, I wrap in parchment and place in a ziplock bag. I deliver right before Christmas with extra parchment for baking and a note with heating instructions!
I found this recipe years ago in everyday food – and it’s a winner! Man, I miss that magazine!
https://www.marthastewart.com/317925/cranberry-orange-scones
My go-to for all our neighbor friends and my team at work is a bunch of homemade frozen cookie dough balls. I use the smitten kitchen salted chocolate chunk recipe, which freeze really well and bake up great without needing to thaw. I also keep a giant bag in my own freezer 🙂
if it must be a gift card then a local independent bookstore makes a great, suit anyone gift. We are lucky enough to have one in our little city. Non gift cards – family puzzles (full disclosure – we only seem to do them around winter break but it makes each year’s family puzzling even more special as time flies by) or a game of battleship – works for most ages. I also love sketchbooks and blank journals for most ages.
My go to is a fancy bottle of olive oil.
My go to giftbis scratch tickets. Everyone loves a scratch ticket! My uncle won $1,000 one year.
my go-to gift is Bombas socks!!!
I always try to give something Homemade. This year it’s homemade jam + a box of Fisher Original Fair Scone mix (previous years we’ve given homemade tomatillo salsa, pickles,etc).
I also like to gift mini-poinsettias from Trader Joe’s. They’re $3.99 and so cute.
My go-to gift is Mark Bitmans How To Cook Everything. It’s the perfect gift for friends who are getting married, buying a home or seasoned chefs who could just use some variations on the old classics!
Here in northeastern Connecticut, we have lots of locals who tap and make maple syrup. It can be pricey so it’s not something people always buy for themselves. A jug of it goes a long way as a sweetener in recipes, topping for pancakes and waffles, or a treat when stirred into warm milk. Syrup makes a lovely gift!
Many a gift exchange has turned ugly because of this gift – a jar of homemade antipasto, a sleeve of good
quality crackers and a bottle of full bodied red.
Homemade granola!
We get all the cousins (ages between 6 and 12) MBerry tablets. They temporarily change your sour taste buds to sweet, so chomping on a lemon or line or drinking vinegar seems like lemonade. Blue cheese seems like vanilla yogurt. Then we have a tasting party when we are all together and eat all kinds of weird stuff. Pickles! Limes! Plain skyr!
Waiter order pads for kids. Succulents for adults. Kitchen full of homemade cookies for drop in friends and neighbors. Fingers crossed nobody is forgotten!
My go-to is a good bottle of olive oil.
This year, we have had a lot of big changes in the family and extended family- births, deaths, moves, a wedding, a divorce, new jobs, and so on. Somehow we were tapped out before Thanksgiving. (One of the moves was ours, out of state, to new jobs) I desperately needed to simplify the holidays, but also somehow keep them warm. Instead of stressing about shopping for and shipping dozens of gifts back home, my husband and I made a lump sum dedicated donation to family-to-family.org (an beloved organization I learned about right here on DALS!!) and notified family members with a card plus a small Penzeys gift card. The combination felt exactly right this year; simple, meaningful, with a dash of warmth.
Since we don’t live near our family, we like to give local food gifts and/or consumables to the folks that “already have everything they need.” Being from Ann Arbor, we’re lucky to have a lot of great options – particularly Zingerman’s, Roos Roast Coffee, and Cherry Republic. These gifts are always a big hit!
It takes a little time and advance planning, but I love making photo books that are little stories with the receiving kid as the main character. It doesn’t cost any more than a nice kids book, and it’s so fun to see them excited about being in a book!
It seems a little pedantic on this site, but I love to give things that get people cooking something they love. My mom is a great cook, but forever buying pre-made lentils. I gave her a recipe and the ingredients, all measured out, to make 2 batches. For my nephew is was lemon bars. Also, no one seems to complain when I show up with a batch of granola. It makes a great hostess gift with a note about tomorrow’s breakfast. Thanks for the great ideas!
Another gift idea, The book Educated or The Nightingale. Happy Holidays!
Growing up, my mom would always buy a ton of really nice soap bottles (the nice pump top kind) and write a really sweet note about “Wishing you and your family a happy and healthy Holiday Season and New Year” (it would vary to cater to the giftee). It is so nice because everyone uses hand soap, its not very expensive, and the little notes were always so cute and clever.