Your Life, My Thoughts

I fit all three categories, so in exchange for $60 (cash only), I will gladly attend all of your holiday parties with you.  Bringing your hosts a new friend counts as a gift, yes?

If buying a low-to-mid-range escort isn’t your preferred way to spread the holiday cheer, I’ve come up with this list of backup ideas:

No foodie worth their rolls of fat can call themselves such (a ridiculous name) without an appreciation and interest in understanding how their meals make it from the farm to their fork. These gift ideas will expand their culinary knowledge and make them better dinner party conversationalists in the future. 

• In Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics by Heston Blumenthal. This cookbook examines the origins, journey, and cultural history of some of the most well known dishes in British and American cuisine, and then perfects the recipes. Think Alton Brown with a British accent.
• Honorable mention in the “history of” cookbook division: The Geometry of Pasta. It is exactly what it sounds like.
• A year’s membership to the New York City Beekeeper Association. That’s right, bees!!! Give your fattie foodie friends an up-close look at one of the most vital links in our food chain. Through membership at the NYCBA, they can learn the basics of urban beekeeping, host a hive, or simply pay respects to the humble honeybee safely and responsibly.

Your wild friends need just two things, something to make their nights wilder, and something to help them through the aftermath.

• If you act fast, your wild and crazy comrades can get the most coveted item in NYC this holiday season - Four Loko. You might have to check a dozen shady bodegas, or resort to haggling on Craigslist, but with enough time and effort, you can score this most potent of potables.
• For the hangover, try either a McDonald’s gift card (greasy food is a drunk person’s best friend), and/or a few bottles of electrolyte-rich Pedialyte (not just for digestively challenged toddlers anymore). 
• (Honorable mention: contraception and a complementary car ride/metrocard swipe to Planned Parenthood.)

Trying to get a fashion-forward person something they’ll like head on is a daunting task.  Most items are outside of this (ridiculous!) monetary limit, and while fads are cheap, they’ll be out of vogue by spring. So here are some suggestions that get around the high priced/trendy obstacle.

• Let’s face it, nothing would satisfy your fashion-forward friends more than having their picture featured on The Sartorialist. $20 can’t accomplish that, but throw it in with some other key factors and it could bring them closer to that dream. And how’s that, you ask? Well, one of Scott Shuman’s favorite motifs are skinny girls in high heels on vintage-style bikes. Unfortunately, diet books, stilettos, and a Velorbis aren’t in the budget. But you know what is - a bike bell.  When you present your gift, tell them to put on their finest duds and spend a weekday afternoon riding through SoHo and the meatpacking district ringing their bell while keeping their eyes peeled for a short dapper man with a camera around his neck.
• Give someone a camel cape and they’ll be warm for a season, teach them how to make it and they’ll be warm for a lifetime. DIY blogger Erica Domesek can help your fashionable friends achieve that through her book P.S. - I Made This, a compilation of her favorite projects. (an eye-roll inducing title, I know, but her shit’s quality). 
• Consider sprucing up their living spaces with a print from 20x200. The works offered are aesthetically pleasing and in short supply - familiar concepts for this group.

I still think my $60 fee is way easier than having to deal with all of the above, though.

No payment or compensation was accepted in exchange for coverage, though I will gladly consider it in the future. (Hint, hint). Keep the holiday questions rolling in.