Don't Give a Woman You Barely Know Jewelry

And other tips for giving holiday gifts that won't cause awkwardness or offense

I'm terrible at darts, pool, bowling, bags, horseshoes, free throws, and, while it's been a long time since I've fired a gun, probably shooting. Anything that requires aim humbles me. Everything, that is, except Christmas presents.

If Christmas present-giving were an Olympic sport, I would have a decent shot at qualifying for the national team.

First, I try to buy the gift recipient something that they are unlikely to buy themselves. It helps if they (the recipient) are cheap. Frugal people are no fun to shop with but they're fun to shop for. One year, I bought my dad a stack of plain sweats from Kohl's because he cares so little about what he wears and spends so much time doing messy outdoor things that most of his casual clothing was full of burrs, wood splinters, pond water, and deer blood stains. The sweats were a hit, although I'm pretty sure they, too, have been filled with stains and holes by now. (Note to self: next year may be another Sweatpants Christmas.)

Less frugal people are trickier, but can be gifted with a higher-end version of something they need, which can be discovered by observing items they use often but are beginning to wear out. I don't live close to my family, but I figure this out by doing recon months in advance and putting ideas down in a Notes folder on my phone, like a benevolent spy. My sister is a teacher, and will need a new backpack by the end her next quarter, and so this year, I got her a fancier backpack than what she'd likely buy for herself. (Mary, if you're reading this, sorry to ruin the surprise.)

The trickiest to shop for are the people who buy themselves what they want when they want it, or who already have everything they need and want. For those people, I buy them something they cannot buy for themselves, either because it is difficult to find or because they can't get it where they're located, or because they aren't aware it exists and are thus unaware that they want it. When I lived in New York City, I'd come home every year with a big old haul of specialty nonperishables from the Dean & Deluca on Broadway & Prince that were always a hit with my mom. (Related: RIP, Dean & Deluca.) I often ship large amounts of cheese from northern Wisconsin's own Burnett Dairy Co-Op to distant friends. For people who don't like stuff, this is where experiences come in, like tickets to events they'd enjoy, memberships to local museums, zoos, or public lands, or gift certificates to highly-touted restaurants they haven't tried. Crafty types can make loved ones something homemade. My only 2022 New Year's Resolution is to get into needlepoint as a way to get myself to spend less time on my phone, and you bet your ass one day in the future I will be giving my husband a needlepoint portrait of his dog.

Out of curiosity about how the other, bad gifting half lives, I googled "gift guides for women" the other day. They were so chock full of bad ideas that it's a marvel that they still exist.

I have never used a gift guide to get ideas for anybody's gift. I'd sooner recommend going through your cousin's trash than buying her a gift off a gift guide. Here's why: the most important component of giving a person a gift they'll love is to know stuff about them.

"Women" as a category is ridiculous on its face. Who is a "gift guide for women" for? Who is the intended audience for the guide? A person looking to buy a gift for a person and the only thing they know about them is that they are a woman? We are half the population. There are many different types of woman. Why are they buying this person they know so little about a gift? Just get them a funny card and put a $20 bill inside. Everybody likes money!

It is with a heavy heart that I report that all of the gift guides for women I perused contain many gifts that should absolutely not be given to a person without previously knowing that the gift recipient wants that specific item. Otherwise, the gifter could get in some trouble.

Every gift guide for women that I found contained a pan or cookware of some kind. It's rich that it's almost 2022 and some people still assume that every woman cooks. We're 20+ years past that Sex & The City episode where the gals talk about how Carrie stores her sweaters in her oven; it's fairly well-established that women can be just as incapable of taking care of themselves as men are. Besides, most culinary-capable women already possess the requisite pans in which to prepare food, so anybody purchasing her a pan would create a redundancy for her. Cookware can be a great gift; it just has to be the right kind of cookware for the right kind of person, not some random Instagram-famous pan from a list in USA Today.

Most gift guides for women contain jewelry. I don't know who needs to hear this but: 99% of the time, you should not buy a woman jewelry, especially a piece of jewelry from a generic gift guide. The risk is too high, the reward is too low. In most cases, the women do not want the jewelry, and all a gift like this does is create an obligation for her to wear it when she's around you. I know a woman who has a relative on her husband's side who buys her jewelry every year, jewelry that is nothing like the kind of jewelry she'd wear, but the woman can't tell the relative to stop giving the jewelry because it would hurt the gift giver's feelings. Avoid this!

Gift guides also, puzzlingly, contain specialty beauty products like anti-aging night cream or acne-fighting primer. One needn't be an etiquette expert to know that this is a bad gift to give unprompted, as it essentially amounts to a gift-wrapped announcement that the recipient could have better skin. The only time specialty skin care is a good gift is when the gifter has a sort of lawful evil personality and wishes to give the gift of lower self-esteem to a loved one.

Razors and other grooming hardware, puzzlingly, continue to make appearances on gift guides. I can't imagine how strange it would feel to receive a set of Venus razors from an aunt or uncle or office Secret Santa.

I saw a lot of cleaning supplies on gift guides for women. I saw no equivalent cleaning supplies on gift guides for men, unless said cleaning supplies were things like grill cleaner or a car cleaning kit, items designed to enhance a man's hobbies, whereas the women's cleaning supply suggestions will assist said woman in making shared space nice for everyone. Unless she asked for it, do not buy a woman cleaning supplies. My god.

Of course, if none of those terrible ideas seem fit for the woman who has everything (or, more accurately, nothing), there's always cookbooks that celebrity lifestyle mavens pretended to write that contain recipes involving enough mozarella to take down a large carnivore. Or a hairdryer, even though she probably already has one.

Whoever wrote this year's woman gift guides must have gotten together for a meeting wherein they all decided that women are very tired and need fluffy things to wrap themselves in so that they may rest from all that exfoliating, cooking, cleaning, and jewelry wearing. Blankets, oversized sweatshirts, fluffy robes, and novelty products that are some combination of all three are frequent fliers on gift guides for women. This says a lot about what we expect of women and how much we understand it takes out of them, which is kind of nice; better than thinking that women have unlimited energy to care for the space and well-being of others. Plus, a high-quality blanket is actually a pretty good gift in most situations. Much less bad than a chocolate diamond Pandora bracelet or the Arcona Problem Skin Starter Kit.

My favorite gift guide for woman this year was from a guide that deigned to divide the category of "woman" into other, more specific categories. One gift-- Birkenstocks-- was specifically singled out "for the one who walks a lot." Imagine you know a woman who has been walking around, in complete agony, unable to discern the source of her pain. This is the gift that says... "I have noticed that you walk a lot. Here's an idea: shoes."

There's the chance that Gift Guides are actually written with the intent that people will use them to source gift ideas for themselves that they pass out to family and friends, but if you are so flush with belongings that you can't brainstorm a wish list without a women's magazine reminding you that candles exist, perhaps stuff is not what you need.

Anyway, Merry Christmas, from this One Who Walks A Lot to you and yours.

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