One Gift Guide to Rule Them All
Chock Full of Small Businesses + Kooky Shit
Every holiday season, the Culture Study community raises funds for others’ immediate and material needs. Last year, we raised over $16,000 for Trans Santa. Just last week, we raised a stunning $10,245 to buy the Littlefield Family a new van to transport all their mobility devices. (You can find all receipts in my IG stories here).
This year, my hope is to raise just as much in order to buy a bunch of beds, kids’ bikes, computers, couches and more for recently arrived refugees through their wishlists at Miry’s List. Big ticket items like this are hard for individual donors to buy on their own — but much easier for big groups like us to cover. Working together, we can make a huge difference in a family’s day-to-day life, comfort, and overall feeling of *home.*
To donate to the fund, you can Venmo me at annehelen, PayPal at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com. I’ll match the first $500 in donations, and as always, I’ll post receipts for all cash-outs and purchases.
If your inbox is anything like mine, this past week has been one long stream of DEALS DEALS DEALS BUY BUY BUY. It’s exhausting, in part because we’ve been trained to conceive of paying full price for anything as getting snookered in some way. If only fools pay list price, then every time you delete or ignore a sale email, you’re participating in your own fooldom. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t really need or even particularly want the thing you’re buying: you bought it on sale, which marks you Unfooled.
All of this is bullshit, of course, but it takes a very strong understanding of math, percentages, and the fact that you actually save far more money when you buy nothing to resist this thinking. And because online shopping means everyone can seemingly shop everything from everywhere, this week has transformed from one of gift-purchasing to everything purchasing. It’s not just that Black Friday is a whole damn week (if not two) — it’s that it’s become the week to buy just as much stuff for yourself (it’s finally on sale!) than others.
None of it feels that great. Even if you are primarily buying for others, clicking order now on a bunch of virtual carts at massive conglomerates just doesn’t have quite the same feeling as running holiday errands, going to a holiday market, or seeing something and knowing exactly who you want to give it to. Maybe you still have the capacity to do that where you live. Or maybe the closest thing you can approximate is buying from small businesses — who, for better and for worse, absolutely rely on this month’s income to get them through the rest of the year.
So that’s what I’m trying to highlight with this Gift Guide — a bunch of small businesses, many of them owned by Culture Study subscribers, where you can find weird and wonderful and different gifts for yourself and others, including gifts for kids, new & practiced cooks, absolute peak coziness, consummate Swifties, pottery-heads, fiber arts addicts, fabulously unique earrings and more.
Yes, some of this stuff is expensive, because making stuff without exploitative labor practices is often expensive. The goal with these sorts of gift guides isn’t to buy everything; the goal is to buy one thing (or a few things) that feel meaningful and right. There are a handful of businesses in here that could be classified as “medium-sized,” but the vast majority are very small and very local.
Finally, yes, this is paywalled — just like the links at the end of every Sunday’s newsletter are paywalled and this Tuesday’s GIFT CONCIERGE thread (where you can ask for help finding a gift for a specific person in your life) is paywalled. For whatever reason it’s small stuff like this that convinces people to subscribe to the content they value. Thank you for valuing Culture Study and the time it took to put together these NINETY-EIGHT recs!