Gifts for your friend who’s a lot like me

36 gifts I’d be very excited to receive

I LOVE GIFTS. Giving them, searching for them, receiving them—I’m a gift girl. Years ago someone asked me what my love language was, and when I told them it was gifts they said that I must be “really shallow and selfish”. Cool! That person is dead to me, but I’ll never forget how misunderstood I felt in that moment because it’s just who I am.

I totally get that the holiday season is filled with all kinds of complicated feelings and that the commercial aspects of the season can be pretty yuck. Last year I did a thing on Instagram where I asked people to submit specific gifts they needed to buy and I gave suggestions back, and I pretty quickly learned that buying a gift for your brother’s girlfriend’s sister who happens to be included in your family’s gift exchange is not a fun challenge but instead anxiety-inducing and frustrating for a lot of you.

But lucky for you, I am the internet’s #1 online window shopper and I LOVE a challenge. 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. And vice versa: I keep a running list in my phone of gift ideas year-round for my friends and family, so anytime they mention something I can take note.

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There’s no virtue in this; I wish I had a love language with a little less literal and metaphorical baggage (like, quality time would be nice), but alas, this is me.

Because I now have this newsletter I decided to really dig in this year starting with an easy one: gifts for people who like the same things I like. Is it for everyone? Nope! Will you find something for your dad? Probably not! But there are already a billion gift guides with whiskey stones out there, so I’m doing this my way.

Over the next few weeks I’ll randomly drop a few more guides here and there, including one with gifts that support independent artists, a book-centric gift guide, and one of last minute gifts that don’t require shipping lead times. These will all be for paid subs, so this might be the time to upgrade if you haven’t already.

Without further ado: gifts for people who are a lot like me: