I’m a little relieved that this is our last blog post for the year. Sorry, Mr. Williams. After months of writing 250-word, 350-word, 500-word, 750-word, and 1000-word essays, it feels like I have little capacity to think much deeper than what might be on my next test.
Lucky for me, it’s December 1st, and you know what that means?
Christmas! Christmas has always been one of my favorite holidays, not even necessarily for gifts or for parties, but for the atmosphere and the coziness that it brings. The older feel of the Christmas music that we grew up with brings me back to childhood, and the pretty lights remind me that despite all of the bad things in the world, people still love having innocent fun.
Christmas also means buying presents for your friends and family! Right now, I have no source of income. I still need to go out and get a job, but I think that that’s a post-college app season issue. My jobless state gives me a little less flexibility for gift-giving. Thankfully, Secret Santa allows me to focus all of my attention on one person, making it easier for me to focus on quality.
I think that my Secret Santa gifts are pretty good, so let me let you in on my process of putting together presents for my loved ones.
Today I’ll be going through my stream of consciousness as I venture on my quest to buy the perfect Christmas present.
My gifts often have three parts: I have the most expensive or bigger part, a food item, and a cheaper, smaller item.
So to start: I find a niche for my person.
In my opinion, the best gifts are extremely personalized, and the type of thing that someone would love to have but not want to spend the extra money on. My Secret Santa’s favorite book is The Three Body Problem, a book related to astronomy. I also know that they like little trinket-like objects.
Once I have that niche in the back of my mind, I start searching on the internet for things that might fall into that niche.
One day, when I was searching for gifts for a family friend’s birthday present (yeah there’s a lot of shopping going on right now… my birthday money is really stretching it), I discovered the website Uncommon Goods. This store might already be common knowledge (or at least it was to my mom), but I had no idea of its existence before I was searching frantically for culinary gifts for my future patisserie friend’s gift (< they clearly had a niche too…) which is “due” on Saturday.
As I scrolled through the cute gifts, I stumbled across this Desktop Timekeeper.
The “Celestial Desktop Timekeeper” is a fully working historical reproduction of an astronomical clock! How much niche-er do you get than that?
The more time I spent on the website, the more the ideas began flowing.
Another option was a little less on the niche, but the vibes were similar.
It’s a swan that can predict the weather. It reacts to levels of atmospheric pressure. When the atmospheric pressure is high, which indicates clear weather, the liquid sinks low in the neck. When the atmospheric pressure is low, indicating an approaching storm, the liquid rises.
It’s a gift suitable for a nerd.
Now, in order to make sure that this gift really was a good fit for my Secret Santa, I needed to (very inconspicuously) confirm their interests.
As I waited for the response, I took a closer look at the details of the swan.
Hm.
Two thoughts went through my mind: “where are they going to fit that?” and “they would definitely not take this to college with them”
Maybe not the swan.
Thankfully, I received a very confused response to my expertly ambiguous question. I decided the timekeeper was still the best option.
Now that I’ve found the likely centerpiece of my gift (I still haven’t purchased it), I need to find the smaller gifts that accompany it.
The food items are always pretty simple. For me, it’s easy to remember their favorite snack or candy because we often go to the grocery store together to buy ingredients to bake with. Food items are pretty straightforward, so I don’t think I’ll have to think too hard about this one.
Lastly, I have to buy the small part of the gift. I’m thinking I’ll go out and find a smaller $10 Lego set at Target or on Amazon. Buying legos is crazy expensive right now, but who doesn’t love Legos?
That concludes my gift-giving train of thought so far! Happy December friends. 🙂