everyone has a gift guide now

why can't i stop reading all the gift guides?

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

It’s gift guide season! It’s only the first week of December, but this year the gift guides started coming fast and furious, well before Thanksgiving. While magazines and publishers have long been in the gift guide business, in 2022, every newsletter also has its own gift guide.

I want to be clear: I’m not hating on anyone for doing a gift guide. Many of my favorite newsletters have published gift guides, which I read and buy things from. I personally wrote gift guides in this newsletter rounding up some of my own favorite things in 2021 and 2020. I thought about writing one this year, but laziness won out — it takes a lot of work to put a good gift guide together! — so I don’t have one. But I do think it is interesting to explore why everyone is a professional gift guide writer now, and why we love gift guides so much. (Because I definitely read all of them.)

One is, of course, economics: publishers of gift guides make money through affiliate links if someone buys something through their link. (The Atlantic explained this well here.) For big media companies, getting a little cut from Amazon and other retailers when they recommend something is a growing source of revenue, something that’s become crucially important as ad revenue declines and publishers are looking for other ways to make money. For people who work for themselves or freelance, gift guides or product recommendations in a self-published newsletter are an even more important revenue stream — buying products recommended by your favorite newsletters is a way of supporting those creators and helping them monetize their work and make their living.

Secondly: there are so many choices of what to buy now, and it is harder and harder to filter through all of it and make a decision. If you search for, say, “leggings” on Amazon, you get 70,000 results. 70,000! Trying to comb through all the options requires an extensive mental calculus of comparing reviews, prices, customer photos, and shipping times. Enter the gift guide: wouldn’t it just be easier to buy the leggings that a recommendation site says are the best leggings, rather than try to comb through the thousands of options?

I recently had this exact experience when I decided to start doing gel nails at home (highly recommend, btw): I searched on Amazon for a gel nail lamp and got 1,000 results. Instead of trying to figure out which of the many generic Amazon brands was best, I went to the Tiktok profile of an influencer I love who does her own gel nails at home, clicked on her Amazon storefront in her link-in-bio, found the “Nails” section, and bought the exact lamp and gel nail polishes she recommended. It was a lot more efficient to simply buy what an influencer recommended than to try to wade through all the options myself. And I got the added bonus of feeling good about supporting a creator whose work I enjoy. (And a gel mani at home!)

I also think a big reason people love writing gift guides is that it gives them an opportunity to signal their taste. In curating the products you love, you’re reflecting a little bit about what you like and what it says about you, and ultimately, who you are. Are you the kind of person who knows about obscure and beautiful home goods? Do you have flawless skin and know what all the best skincare and beauty products are? Do you have great style and everyone you know seeks out your fashion recommendations? For the reader who purchases a curated gift recommendation, it can show your loved ones that you in turn have great taste and are a thoughtful gift giver who can delight them with the perfect gift.

You might also be reading gift guides for yourself, too: if you read a gift guide that claims to have the perfect gifts for foodies, and you’re someone who loves food, it’s really fun to peruse food-themed gift guides and find items you might want someone to get for you…. or that you might just want to buy yourself. (Not that I’ve ever done that exact thing.)

I’ve already read dozens of gift guides this holiday season and will probably continue to browse dozens more. But it’s also worth thinking about what you really want out of the holidays, and how the gift guide-ification of everything can encourage the worst of our capitalist tendencies. As Ann Friedman wrote in her newsletter this week about gift guide overload:

The saccharine conclusion of every Christmas movie is that the holidays are about having a special chance to connect with special people we love (or, per Hallmark, to reconnect with a random guy we dated in high school, before we moved away and got sucked into our soulless city-gal lifestyle). Yet service journalism about the holidays remains firmly fixated on shopping, with recipes and travel tips hovering on the periphery. Look at capitalism, trying to have it all! 

As Ann later notes, the point of the holidays is to spend time with your loved ones, not just to buy them stuff. And for that… can I recommend making some coquito?

Good things to read

Life in the slow lane, Longreads. On the history of the slow cooker!

Christmas trees trimmed in irony, New York Times. My Christmas tree currently has a Die Hard ornament, a LaCroix ornament, and a Wu-Tang ornament, among others, so….guilty.

The pandemic exposed the inequality of American motherhood, The Atlantic.

Instagram is over, The Atlantic.

What is it this time? The Cut.

The eternal comfort of the casserole, Men Yell At Me.

EOY lists, Dirt. “They are mostly vacuous grounds for bragging — proof that we’ve read, watched, streamed, accomplished something in the infinite scroll of life.”

How now to be a character in a bad fashion movie, New York Times.

Olive oil never needed a rebrand — but it’s getting one anyways, Eater.

Good things to cook

Here’s what I’ve cooked in the last two weeks: Rosemary chicken bacon avocado pitas with honey feta sauce. Poblano corn quesadillas. Fish taco bowls. Enchilada skillet. Korean BBQ meatballs. Enchilada stuffed sweet potatoes.