The Christmas Gift Guide, 2024

Things I Loved Lately: Christmas Bumper Edition, Part I

Happy Saturday! Wanna buy some stuff? 

Yes, friends, you guessed it: we are so back, and I am so happy about it. It is my pleasure to welcome you back to the Christmas Gift Guide, and also, in a very real sense, to welcome you back to Christmas itself. 

I’m sitting here with a martini in one of the beautiful pink star-cut crystal martini glasses off last year’s Gift Guide. My friend Tessa bought them for me off the back of the guide (clever me!), and they have brought me joy every day of the year. Even when I’m just looking at them I feel happier! This is, basically, at the heart of buying good presents: will this make the person happier every time they remember that they own this thing? I hope that the things in this guide will make the people you love happy! And, maybe, the people you don’t love but kind of have to buy a gift for anyway. Maybe the gift will be so good it will open a new window in your complex relationship! I don’t know. We can but try! We will try!

Anyway, I have my martini, and the heating is on at last, and the Netflix Fireplace For Your Home 4K is dancing merrily on the telly. I have so many beautiful things for you! And not just for you.

I have beautiful things for your distant mothers and difficult brothers and graphic design husbands and pyromaniacs and furious adolescents. I have trinkets for your most glamorous colleague and her most glamorous dog, and I have bones for your regular dog who needs a little love too. Cats! Babies! Men who want for nothing, and the men who buy themselves everything! Your cousin who works in the City! Mothers-in-law! Fathers-in-law! Publishing wives! Family, chosen family, and the family you’re staying with who– crucially– aren’t your family! Your recently bereaved sister who is having the worst Christmas of her life, your brother with global anxiety, your best school friend who went through some stuff, went travelling and came back from Peru sort of… different? We’ve got them all. 

We will even revisit the Cooking Boyfriend and the Indoor Girlfriend from last year’s gift guide, because the best present is something that builds on last year’s present (assuming, of course, last year’s present was successful). And boy, how we will build. 

The very best presents, as we know from last year, are the things you carefully wrote down in your Notes app throughout the year. Did you do this? I did this diligently for…about two people, neither of whom are my Secret Santa. I am in three Secret Santas this year, with budgets ranging from £10-£250, and I have nothing in the ol’ Notes app. Nothing! In my defence, I did not expect it to be Christmas so soon! 

This is also why absolutely nobody is getting anything home-made from me this year. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! In June I knew I was going to make beautiful things, thoughtfully and with intention! This is the only way to make beautiful things for people, because you can’t be making fifty jars of marmalade and handing them out to all and sundry: not if you want praise for your present-giving. That is a one-way street to someone giving you back your own marmalade next year, perhaps in a half-hearted hamper. You want to make a present? You have to do it with the person you’re making it for at the heart of it. And listen: I can just about hold the people I love at the heart of things at this time. What I cannot do, at this time, is hold them all at the heart of everything for as long as it takes to create and craft a thoughtful and intentional gift from scratch. Even thinking of this is taking me further and further away from the zen and beautiful image of the holidays I seek to inhabit, and so I suppose if you are also surprised– and perhaps spiralling– at the imminence of the festive season, welcome. Hello.

This is for everyone, but especially for you. This is the gentle welcome to Christmas you deserve. It’s all going to be ok. We have every answer you seek, at least giftwise. Put the heating on. Light a candle. Make yourself a martini, and perhaps a bowl of instant ramen with kimchi and cheese, and settle in with your credit card. Let’s buy things.

In fact, let’s start now.