My Anti-Gift Guide Gift Guide

Gift guides are dumb. Here's one anyways.

I’ve always found the concept of gift guides to be deeply presumptuous. How could a stranger purport to have any insight on who I’m buying for and the types of things they like? The categories of person you’re buying for always feel false and overwrought, plus the gifts themselves tend to be corny and useless. Who wants a lobster nativity scene or a $100 ashtray? (I say this as someone who has absolutely had to put together a gift guide professionally before. )

Gift guides have gained a ton of traction in recent years because they’re a powerful expression of the cult of personality. Take the gift guide it girl publicist Kaitlin Phillips’ has been putting together since 2021, first in Google doc form, now a paid Substack. People wet themselves at a chance to read Phillips’ gift guide because they’re eager for a peek into a tiny slice of her brain. They’re also just a fun escapist way to participate in this obliquely consumerist time of year. It’s all a bit silly.

If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, I suggest going to your local "rich-people grocery store and buying the most luxurious treat you can find. Or go to the ‘everything else’ section of SSENSE and sort prices from low to high, where you can find a $17 Barbour waxed canvas hood for the person with a very small head in your life, fancy packaged soaps, or some elegant class cups.

I don’t think a gift should be a beautiful flimsy doodad that a person would never have purchased for themselves. That sounds like something that’s just going to junk up my apartment. I prefer to give and receive gifts that are staunchly practical and can somehow be incorporated into my everyday life—like Smartwool socks. Here are some things that I would be delighted to receive as a gift.

Anything Le Creuset

Ever since I began to fancy the idea of having my own ‘grown-up’ kitchen, I have idolized everything put out by Le Creuset. I bought my first piece of Le Creuset, a cerise French oven, in my late 20s and it’s been going strong ever since. While the enamel cast-iron pieces are eye-wateringly expensive, there are plenty of affordable luxuries on offer like the salt crock or the olive oil cruet. I love the idea of taking a pinch of kosher salt out of a beautiful vessel every time I cook.

A Good Knife

Cooking-related gifts are resolutely practical and the ultimate gift for a kitchen obsessive is a really good knife. It’s an insane category where you can find something that’s standard and solid or you could go absolutely buck-wild and buy an artisanal hand-forged knife made by some guy in his garage for four times the price. I like this elegant Miyabi Japanese knife made with wavy steel.