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What gifts did you give this year?
Now that the holiday season is nearly over, I figured it is a good time to share the gifts that we gave this year. If there is a particular reason why you gave what you did, please share!
Edit: Going to plug USPS's Operation Santa. I plan to participate next year since it seems pretty direct with the giving. Found out about it way too late this year!
I don't have much cash to spend, and I'm terrible at coming up with cheap/thoughtful gift ideas, so I went the "services" route instead:
Edit: I also agreed to rent a server where I'll be self-hosting whatever services they want (cloud storage, chat, email, etc.) in an attempt to de-Google the family.
I didn't give out too many presents this year with my significant other and I spending Christmas to ourselves, away from family. I gave her two gifts: a large electric blanket and a label maker. Very romantic, I know. But the label maker made her day when she got it as she has always wanted one. This thing is pretty rad.
For other family members, we sent out a ton of gift cards for Starbucks and other dining places. I gifted an Echo Show 8" to an elderly family member who needed something simple to video call. I'm still unsure if that was a good gift as I typically like to test tech-stuff before gifting it out. The biggest gift I sent out this year was a Quest 2, another tech item I haven't used but heard good things about (besides the Facebook garbage). The price point on the Quest 2 headsets are unreal for VR so I thought it would be a good gift for someone who is more homebound than most people.
For my mom: a lemon-ginger tea, Pyrex pitchers, the complete series of MASH, a shit-ton of chocolate, a South Carolina calendar, a cherry RC cola, an Opinel pocket knife, a novel about climbing the French Alps in the 20s, and a lotto scratcher.
I gave my brother a Yubikey (he's hard to get gifts for), my sister got a book on urban farming for our region, my mom got a little ceramic hanger that you put fabric scraps in for birds, and my fiancée got some fancy sheepskin boots because we moved where it gets real cold.
Pins, board games, artwork, prog rock cassette tapes, windchime, food.
Little sis got a Wonder Woman comic book anthology (400 pages) and a poetry book by an actress of the TV show Riverdale. She’s a fan.
Mother got an electric pan, since she loves both cooking and new gadgets.
My roommate and friend got a bunch of high quality text markers because he uses those all the time.
Everyone loved it.
My girlfriend was asking me for a recommendation for a prayer book so I’ll give her one I think will be useful. We haven’t exchanged gifts yet.
A bunch of things, but the one I thought was the most interesting is a <first_name><last_name>.com domain name for my brother. It's registered for 10 years, so once he graduates college it can be used for a personal site and a fancy email address for a while.
My SO and had to make a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. Just on my side I have 5 siblings and 7 niblings so it's wild. But I'm very happy with the rum we got one of my brothers. He was impressed and asked where we got it. It was a recommendation from r/rum lol. It was all he asked for so we figured we'd try to get him something good. I'm glad we impressed him lol.
Miyazaki's epic 1000-page Nasicaä manga! It always kinda sorta existed on my radar as this thing that seems a bit too good to be true. I'm not that far in but the movie's plot is already pretty much over so there's a lot new stuff still coming. I honestly haven't been this sucked into a comic since first discovering Akira, it's kinda on the same level.
For me directly, I got a few shirts, shorts, pants and socks. (A lot of the clothes I have are ~‐3 years old, so they're moderately worn out and somewhat tight on me due to literal growing up (and my parents often buy larger clothes specifically so they fit in me longer.) so personally I'm cool with it.
I got to enjoy some significantly more fancy panettones in both mine and my grandma's houses, but that was with other people.
Personally, my father buying his new phone and passing the new one to me is far bigger a gift than anything they could get me this Christmas.
Just FYI the question was what gifts did you give to others this year.
Oh, I read right past that. Not being of working age, I don't think I've given anyone anything.
Panettone is amazing. I bought a very fancy, salted caramel one this year for the holidays. It is heavenly. Although chocolate chip panettone is still GOAT to me.
Just an FYI, in Brazil (where me and @kuromantis are from), salted panettone is a novelty. Panettone with caramel and/or chocolate is also not considered panettone, it’s something else, called “chocotone”. A much more recent innovation. It’s part of the trend of making everything a candy. The original panettone with cristalized fruit is going out of fashion in favor of progressively higher amounts of sugar and chocolate. Eventually, we’ll just serve cups of melted chocolate bars :P
That makes me sad.
I’m sorry about that. I’m not sure I have much else to say.