Take a Stroll Through the À La Carte Holiday Shop
And why I’m not sending gift guides this year
I’ve been daydreaming about a holiday gift-buying experience that trades shipping boxes for ribbon-handled bags and promotional emails for perfectly curated pop-ups. Every year, I spend weeks collecting gifts, recipes, décor ideas, and little details in anticipation of the holidays, and I can’t help but romanticize it all—gifting is my love language, in case you couldn’t tell.
In my imagination, holiday shopping looks infinitely more fun than it does in reality. I’m wearing a hat and winter coat while I dip in and out of stores that feel like The Shop Around the Corner. There are no chaotic after-work mall runs, no lost order confirmation emails, and no long register lines. We’d break from our shopping marathon to have a long lunch at the department store café. I’d be able to find the perfect thing for everyone on my list, and even get it personalized if I want to. The gift wrap station would be, in a word, magical.
This year, I wanted to create something that captured that feeling, bringing a sense of discovery and pleasure back into the gift shopping process. Enter: The À La Carte Holiday Shop.
Come in! The À La Carte Holiday Shop is a standalone space devoted entirely to the details of the holiday season. Think of it as our own online department store, complete with gift assortments, décor ideas, recipes, party outfits, and more.
On the first floor, you’ll find the gift guides: gifts for hosts, gifts made by artists, gifts you can personalize, gifts for under $50—and, as always, gifts for people who like all the same things I do. And more! Each guide will be continuously updated as new potential gift items catch my eye. Instead of receiving a one-off email that will get lost in your inbox, you can explore at your leisure and check back all season long for new additions.
Next, we have the various departments. There’s The Party Floor, a space dedicated to party outfit inspiration, cocktail recipes, and tabletop ideas for hosts and guests alike. The Food Hall is stocked with edible gifts and my favorite recipes for the season—think cookie recipes, dinner party classics, and the latkes I make every year. And then there’s The Décor Department, your one-stop shop for everything you need to make things beautiful, from ribbon and ornaments to DIY wrapping ideas.
These are like aisles you can wander down to get inspired. Whether you’re throwing a party, decorating a mantle, or trying to up your gift wrapping game, there are tons of links to products, tutorials, playlists, and more in each of these departments to set you up for seasonal success.
Finally, down in the basement, you’ll find personal shoppers on standby—aka lists of my favorite places to shop online and IRL for gifts. This service is a bonus for paid subscribers: if you pay for this newsletter, just DM me on Substack or Instagram (or just reply to this email!) for a link to access the lists for free. If you’re a free subscriber, you can unlock any list individually for a one-time fee. I’ll be adding to these all season as well—some of my favorite fellow shoppers will be chiming in with their recs, too.
The Los Angeles and New York City in-person shopping lists are meant to be your companion to the perfect bop-around shopping day, each featuring a list of my favorite spots in each city and a Google Map you can download to your phone. For those of you who’d rather bop from home, the online list is a mega-compilation of all my favorite digital destinations for gift shopping.
Why am I taking gift guides off Substack this year? Mainly, I don’t want to clutter your inbox with every new gift idea that comes to mind for the next several weeks—there will be so much of that coming your way already. The Shop allows me to keep this newsletter focused on all the best parts of the season (stories, essays, and inspiration) while still building guides that can grow and evolve as the weeks pass. It’s important to me that small businesses and emerging brands continue to get platformed, so here in my newsletter I’ll be deep-diving into a few of my favorites for décor, gifts, and more. And, I want to make this year’s gift guides free to everyone, no matter if you’re a paid subscriber or not.
The doors are officially open! Visit the À La Carte Holiday Shop now through the end of the year.
See you at checkout,
x
Ali
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Ali, this is so fabulous. Cannot wait to sit down and browse through everything. Brava!
outstanding!!! thank you!!!!!!