Gift Hunt, Part 1

So I'm half done with the Christmas shopping. I bought Mom a crossword puzzle-a-day calendar, cause she finds crossword puzzles relaxing. I'm getting Dad a bottle of gift wine; all I have to do is, um, purchase it. That leaves Grandma and Anne.... Grandma is pretty easy to shop for, provided I don't think too much about it. I usually just buy her some kitschy holiday decoration from Bloomingdale's — a teddy bear candle wearing a Santa Claus hat, for example — or something from the Italian market. Anne, on the other hand... I could make a career out of finding a gift for her. Thank God I only have to regale her twice a year.

Of course, Anne says that I'm the impossible one to shop for, so at least we're mutually flummoxed this holiday season. The problem is that Anne has a much better track record when it comes to giving good gifts, so I'm always under pressure to catch up. Worse yet, I've already used up most of my (timeworn) stand-bys already. I've done the Chinese candles. I bought her the cutest stuffed animal in FAO Schwartz (not including this guy), a squeaky manitee, back when we were dating. Come to think of it, I should've started out with, like, the stuffed alligator, and then each year I could've topped myself with an ever cuter stuffed animal than the year before. I'll keep that in mind in case I ever start dating again.

Now, when it gets down to the few days before Christmas and I become desperate, I head out to Kate's Paperie or The Art Store on Bond Street for some art supplies. The idea is to find her something that she'd like but she wouldn't buy for herself. She's an art person, so this kind of works out.

Unfortunately, I'm now running out of good gifts at the art stores, and besides, I want to find gifts that respect Anne as someone beyond "an art person," so every year, I hunt through the city for the perfect Anne gift. Since freshman year, I've actually been compiling a list of stores to hit, and I found the following on the Village Voice's Best of 2004 website.

Best high-concept retailer - TKNY

With a large-screen window display transmitting various media, TKNY appears to be a gallery. Inside, various stalls resemble science projects, though they display objects for sale. By careful examination, I found a necklace that lights up, inflatable speakers, and Archimedes, a little green man in a bottle who I'm still trying to figure out. A store that makes me use my brain more than I am accustomed to when shopping is not entirely a bad thing. -Mary Jacobi

21 Avenue B, Manhattan 212-677-0500

It's worth a look. I don't think Anne's necessarily "high-concept," but I know she's not low-concept, so this might be the right place. Turns out they sell the latest gizmos from Japan: blinking rave jewelry, a vibrator that hooks up to your computer's USB port (???), rubber bands shaped like puppies and kitties. Not really right.

I'm not such a big shopper, so it's not like I've got a data bank of a zillion stores stuck in my head. I was walking through the Lower East Side, passing one girly clothes store after another, and I got to thinking how much easier this task would be if I were a woman. Then I'd know what's cute and what's tacky, what matches her personality and what's just patterned fabric. LES is a haven for cheap, trendy jewelry stores, but that seems too intimate. There's a place on Rivington Street called Toys in Babeland, which is way too intimate.

There's a vintage place in Soho called "Dom" that I check out every year. They never have a thing.

I checked out this place, BLT Supplies, freshman year. They import stuff from China, porcelain and eight-foot-long hot dogs. No, wait, eight-foot-long spears. That's better. It's an idea: a giant spear. I'm not sure how it would go over as a present under the tree: "It's eight feet long with a pointy end. Is it a toaster?"

Next on the agenda is Pearl River Mart, the Chinatown version of Wal-Mart. You can buy anything from green tea to a gong to a decapitated Buddha head there, and I hope there's something for Anne. Does she want chopsticks? How about a set of chopsticks? How about a set of chopsticks and some of those gigantic spoons you get with hot and sour soup in the fancy Chinese restaurants? I don't know.... I might have found some good stuff there.