MY HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 2023

I love shopping. This has footnotes.

I recently realized that, aside from doing its part to fulfill the basic desire of every hot young scenester to be Kaitlin Phillips, writing a Holiday Gift Guide is both a great opportunity to showcase my commercial magazine-writing skills (selling things) AND a way to make the lovely subscribers to this FREE SUBSTACK SUBSCRIPTION TIER¹ aware of things they might want to buy for any smart, sexy, and incredibly cool young writers in their lives. Particularly one who might be drowning in work to finish her first semester of grad school right now. This holiday season, it's all about fetishizing commodities on Substack.

I made a flatlay for this!!

Le Labo 40 Tubereuse is the kind of perfume that you would never wear because it has strong citrus and floral notes bright like orange groves and wisteria, like California, like your youth, and recently you only like patchouli and musk and scents that could be described as "masculine". But over the course of the small tester it grows on you and you decide that maybe you can commit to a whole bottle of it, and anyway everybody you ask says they like it, and one time a barista even asks what you're wearing. You lie and say, umm, Gucci Guilty, because you do not know how to pronounce Tubereuse. You realize that this particular Le Labo fragrance is only sold at its New York City boutiques. It's part of a line of city-exclusive fragrances. You have no idea what these bright florals have to do with the city that you keep buying tickets back to, the city that your lover and most of your best friends are in. You look it up, and the scent for Los Angeles is: musk.

Ever since I saw her documentary, I’ve believed that Nan Goldin’s photobook the Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the only book of its kind I would like to own. Aside from the photos being beautiful (and oft reblogged I mean PINNED onto this writer’s Pinterest), the content and even the title alone make it much too shocking to be a coffee table book, and I hate coffee table books.

That said, I don’t think any actual literary books will end up on this list, as I believe those are rather sacred things which one should have the express pleasure of buying for herself. But this shirt from Acne Studios will end up on this list, because I have realized that the sexiness of being a literary person, while on the cultural rise generally, is also specifically beneficial to me and most of my friends.

In 2007, before the iPhone was announced, LG announced a collaboration with Prada to produce LG Prada, the world's first designer cellphone. Actually, LG Prada was technically the first capacitive touchscreen cellphone ever announced, which makes me think about the The Face at this time, photographer Norbert Schoemer, and a Y2K design tendency to feature mysteriously cropped scenes, objects in space, and surreal new worlds, as if anticipating the commodity's new position behind glass, backlit, and at our fingertips. As a self-declared savant of beautifully designed and horribly outdated technology, I want one of these cellphones badly. Someone on Tik Tok recently forecasted a "retro trend" called "Gen X Soft Club". Sul said "you should comment: die". I commented, "die," and then the comment was removed.

A real-life photograph of me writing this on my 1999 iBook

My best friend Sul left a bottle of Tresemme’s Flawless Curls defining cream at my house after I accidentally locked all of her hair stuff in my car at the mechanic’s and we had to scour the grocery store for suitable replacements. She extended me the greatest gift, grace, and we were karmically rewarded with an actually great hair product. Me and Sul have the same type of hair, so if you also have hair like this, you should use this cream.

If you happen to work at an arts organization, or if you frequent independent used bookstores enough to catch hot commodities, you should procure archival alt-lit ephemera from downtown New York in the 80s as gifts for your friends. As a very lucky receiver of said gifts, I can say that they are my favorite gifts I have ever been given. 

I recently Tweeted “I fear this dress is exactly my size” with a link to this Backless Knit Dress by Maison Margiela. The next day, I saw on the website that someone had purchased the dress. I can only infer that the dress was purchased for me by some handsome Twitter-having admirer. I am holding this space to graciously and sweetly thank my mystery savior, who I am quite certain exists, is reading this, and loves me very much.

The strap-on-me strapless strap-on dildo saved my life. I will try to keep this brief, as I could very well write a thesis-length dissertation on why this specific dildo literally saved my life. And I don’t use the word “literally” lightly here. This object actually changed my perception of what it means to live in this world more than I’ve ever thought it’s possible for any object to do. Even after reading all that Object-Oriented Ontology bullshit.² If you do in fact see a twelve-thousand word article about this object in autostraddle next month, well, you’ve been warned. I love this thing. But for now I’ll spare you the details. All there’s really to say, anyway, is: look, no hands!

The poster that says PRAYER IS WHATEVER YOU SAY ON YOUR KNEES from Wonder Press can be found in both my own and my lover's bedroom, plus probably the bedroom of any hot girl you know. While you're on the Wonder Press website you should also buy all of the books available Plus some teeshirts. You should buy many copies of all the things but especially the books available on the website and you should also add a ridiculously large donation when you check-out.

Last year at Christmas, my mother purchased for both me and my sister beaded 1920's flapper costumes from Amazon. They matched exactly. I was truly astounded. Her being Hindu and her husband (my dad) being Jewish, I have never understood why we celebrate Christmas in the first place. But it seems important to her. I looked at Hannah like, do you understand what's going on? And she looked at me like, no, but be nice. And we were nice. I kept expecting some explanation, even if it would be exactly as random as the gift itself— oh, because it's the 20s again. Because I thought we could have a murder-mystery dinner. Because I was thinking of all going as flappers on Halloween— but my mother didn't say anything.

Youth-Boost Peptide Serum from Goop³

The Ultimate Dry Brush from Goop⁴

Gwyneth's Dry Skin Kit from Goop. This costs three hundred and forty six dollars.⁵

A copy of SPASM magazine. This won’t be out until February, but it will make a very good Valentine’s Day gift, and if you don’t have a Valentine, then you should still buy a copy and you should put on a cool outfit and go to your local hipster coffee shop or dive bar or arts university and sit there and read SPASM. Surely someone hot and interesting will notice that you’re reading SPASM and they might ask you to be their Valentine. Or, if you’re freaky like that, you might even want SPASM to be your Valentine. In which case you could DM SPASM’s instagram something like, “will you be my Valentine?” To which I will probably not respond. 

A goat. One gift I’ve always fantasized about giving to my friend Skijler is a baby goat. Skijler grew up with me in Santa Clarita, California and has subsequently lived a number of places, including various farms in the English and French countrysides. I think they would take excellent care of a baby goat, and we could make goat cheese, and 

Perhaps you will want to purchase these wonderful Ann Demeulemeester boots  if, for example, you unceremoniously threw out your prized Doc Martens after about four years of dutiful service on the streets of New York City, and you could see your socks through the multiple holes you made in them, and you could feel rain and sweat and tequila and sometimes vomit and vomity mop-water through said holes, and then you quit your nightclub job because you were moving across the country, and you couldn’t bring yourself to take your beautiful devastated obedient Doc Martens with you, because they just had so many holes in them and were purchased just a year after they stopped doing the life-warranty thing. You passed a cobbler on the street, and you went in, knowing well your docs were beyond repair, and you took the cobbler’s card, and you didn't go back. You could always buy another pair of Doc Martens, but you won’t ever be nineteen again. They’d been such an expensive purchase, at the time.

On the subject of vomit, potentially, why not slip a tube of Marvis Toothpaste in a loved one’s stocking? I am notably stealing this from Kaitlin Phillip’s actual gift guide last year, which maybe makes me a year late to this, but one day in summer my dear dear friend Bronwen and I took like an hour just to walk around Zitomer and feel like capital-L Ladies and what ridiculous trinket did we both walk away with? A tube or Marvis, mine delicious licorice and hers some wonderful floral flavor, if I remember correctly. 

On the subject of my wonderful friend Bronwen: when I was moving to California, she was disheartened at the correct guess that I would not be allowed to carry a Bucket of mustard on the plane. She had spotted the strange item at some shop on the Lower East Side and she wanted so desperately for this to be my going-away present. Upon Googling “bucket of mustard,” the top terms under “People Also Ask” are: “What can I do with a lot of mustard?” “What is the shelf life of mustard?” and “What are the benefits of eating mustard?” Bronwen is one of my true loves for many gooey friendship reasons, but one of them is: I would in fact eat that much mustard. And I am so delighted at the thought of toting around my mustard pail, full of delicious artisanal mustard.

A more practical gift than a bucket of mustard is a subscription to the Los Angeles Review of Books, which has been putting out quite wonderful work lately, and is in fact a quarterly print volume. Of course you could purchase a digital subscription, but I am telling you right now that over the course of the year’s subscription, the receiver of this gift will have forgotten all about it, and will be pleasantly surprised to find a beautifully curated selection of relevant literary work in their mailbox, four different times, as the seasons change (or, don’t change, if said subscriber is in fact in Los Angeles). 

If you have a lover, you should buy for her and for yourself  day passes to the aquarium. This gift, being paper, ought to be paired with something small and adorable to unwrap, like a nice box of chocolates.⁶ Even if you do not happen, like this writer, to have a habit of dating small-time lesbian fish and wildlife enthusiasts, there is still a shockingly likely chance that your beloved longed to be a marine biologist in childhood. A trip to the aquarium is one of the most intimate gifts you can give her. Most metropolitan areas have aquariums, but if you can comfortably make it to Monterey, California, then you should go to that one. Monterey is a beautiful city, not to mention a great place for a short, romantic getaway. Happy Holidays. May the vastness of the ocean remind you of your capacity for love, your capacity for being loved, and the ultimate joy and wonder of childhood. <3

1. No paid subscription tier for internalized zoey exists to date. Well maybe it exists but nobody subscribes to it.

2. Fun Fact: It should be noted that this is only one of the products on this list to actually have won a design award. The Strap-on-me from Red Dot and the LG Prada from iF international forum.

3. This is a joke.

4. I swear it’s a joke. But a dry brush in general is something I have been eyeing, sick of seeing my old washcloths. Perhaps this one from Officine Universelle Buly?

5. Actually I might prefer anything from Officine Universelle Buly to anything from Goop…

6. I find a particularly nice box of chocolates to be an extremely luxurious and even sensual gift. If you don’t have a lover, you should still buy one for yourself, and you should eat it while reading in the bath, or painting your nails and watching a rom-com. This is a divinely feminine experience. My favorite romcom, The Holiday, also happens to be a Christmas movie. You can simultaneously make fun of both Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet’s accents. If you do have a lover, actually, you should still do this, but you should invite her into your bath.