Gifts For Your Friend Who’s a Lot Like Me, 2024 Edition

24 items I’d be genuinely excited to give (or receive)

A few reminders—I’ll make them quick!:

• On Thursday I’m hosting À La Carte’s first-ever holiday party at Tilda Wine in LA! All the proceeds from the night will go to the National Network of Abortion Funds, and the first 50 partygoers will receive a fun little gift bag from me including a copy of my sold out holiday print issue of À La Carte! Details here.

• I’m running a little Black Friday promotion myself: take 20% off an annual subscription to this newsletter through Tuesday! Normally a subscription is $50 for the year but this makes it just $40. This applies to gift subscriptions too!

Vivian Maier, 1955

Onto the fun stuff! Last year I admittedly overdid it on gift guides, and this year it feels a little like all of society is overdoing it on gift guides, doesn’t it? I planned to skip making them altogether, but then I remembered how much fun I had putting together two of them in particular: Gifts Made By Artists, which I tackled again last week, and Gifts For Your Friend Who’s a Lot Like Me, which seemed to be everyone’s favorite last year. So here I am!

Gifts For Your Friend Who’s a Lot Like Me came into existence because I genuinely really, really love both giving and receiving gifts. I wrote this in last year’s version:

“I think a crucial point about gifts as a love language is that it isn’t about the stuff at all—it’s more about feeling seen and known. It makes me feel loved to get something that only someone close to me would know I’d like, or to think that they were out shopping and saw a thing and thought of me.”

What generally irks me about gift guides is that they’re obviously devoid of context around the actual person you’re trying to find a gift for. Like, every “Gifts for Dads” list is wholly irrelevant to my own dad—I think he’d stare at me blankly if I got him a set of whiskey stones. My favorite gifts to give are the ones that are either things I emphatically love and think someone else would too, or things that feel so uniquely perfect for that person, they wouldn’t make sense for anyone else on my list. I loved this sentiment from

Tahirah Hairston

yesterday:

The best gift guides are the ones that reflect the person who’s writing them, a sort of peek into what they’d be excited to open on Christmas morning. So, this year’s Gifts For Your Friend Who’s a Lot Like Me is made up of some favorite things I already own, my go-to gifts to give others, and items currently on my wish list. Throughout the assortment I’ve added in fun little ideas and twists, things I might do to make something feel extra special for whoever I’m buying for. It’s like we’re shopping together!

Below, 24 ideas for someone who likes a lot of the same stuff I do: