À la carte (December 2, 2024)

The un-gift guide edition

We are all sick in the Turtleneck Season household and so À la carte comes a day late. The sick baby is napping and I want to be napping, but alas, I suffer from the affliction perfectly captured by

Brendan Loper

in this week’s New Yorker:

This is not to suggest that a list of already well-worn recommendations is a milestone of human creativity. Hardly! It seems everyone with an online platform is recommending things these days, as Kyle Chayka recently wrote about for The New Yorker in a piece titled The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture (thanks

A Thing or Two

for the recommendation lol). Late capitalism especially demands this of writers—that we cultivate a brand for ourselves by spinning a web of connection with other cultural producers and consumers. I’m doing it right now! But with everyone online sharing their favorite things, especially at this time of year via gift guides, it does seem like the market for recommendations is nearly saturated. (Case in point: Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, of the aforementioned

A Thing or Two

, are not doing their famous gift guides this year, which I wrote about in last year’s Turtleneck Season Guide to Gift Guides.)

I’ve been asked to bring back my guide to gift guides this year (and its own embedded gift guide) … but I’m drawing a lot of blanks. Between buying a house, moving cross-country, acquiring winter wardrobes for myself, a toddler, and a dog, I’m absolutely exhausted by the amount of consumption and online scrolling I’ve been doing. It feels like every time I enter a room, I realize it is missing a wastebasket or a lamp. I’m still coveting new things—don’t get me wrong—but the near-constant tap-tapping of my credit card has me feeling a little less ambitious in the gift-giving department this year. Last year, the grandparents received digital Aura frames, which allow them to enjoy a constant carousel of images of their granddaughter, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to top that crowdpleaser—except with in-person visits with their granddaughter, which all the grandparents are getting this December.

But just in time for Cyber Monday, here are a few items that I have not regretted purchasing or receiving:

• The TORKIS - a colorful Ikea laundry basket. I bought it in yellow and wish I had bought two more. A dual function object, it is used to carry laundry between the four floors of our new house, and as a place to throw hats and gloves by the front door. I will be enduring the awful drive through exurban winter sprawl back to Schaumburg, Illinois, to purchase at least two more. These KUSTGRAN throw pillows (in anthracite) are also brightening up our breakfast nook, where I aspire to one day have upholstered bench cushions.

• A new laptop case for the first time since 2007.

• A Dyson Digital Skim Cordless vacuum, which I bought for more than 50% off last month. My husband was skeptical that this item would change our lives, but upon finding that it just … vacuumed up dog hair … one to two hours a week have returned to our lives.

• All Fours by Miranda July. This is where I sneak in a regular À la carte recommendation. I felt like I was the last mother-writer in the country to read Miranda July’s latest, which has gone viral amongst the middle-aged clog-wearing perimenopausal literati mom set that I am aging into. I held off because Miranda July is usually a little too weird for me, because I’m not yet perimenopausal, and because I had already read a lot of midlife crisis books this year. But a friend gave me a gift card to an independent bookstore in Evanston for my birthday, and I decided to treat myself a hardcover edition. I don’t want to give too much away to anyone who hasn’t read it, but I am dying to talk about it! (But not with my husband.) Maybe the reason I can’t come up with a list of things I want for Christmas this year is because all I, and all most mothers want, is the opportunity to slip away into a motel room for a few weeks where I can take a lot of baths, which is where I read most of All Fours. I am ready to get weird!

• SusieCakes - this was my first birthday without a SusieCakes cake in a few years, and the local bakery cupcakes I picked up instead just did not cut it. I am still dreaming of a SusieCakes cake arriving on my doorstep unannounced one day. I exercise no self-restraint with a SusieCakes cake. I usually indulge to the point of feeling unwell, and use up half a year’s cholesterol allowance on the buttercream. We were lucky to have a SusieCakes location nearby in the East Bay, but I suppose I will have to rely on nationwide shipping until I find a bakery that uses real buttercream in the Chicago area.

• A New Yorker subscription! We took a break for a couple of years in our household because we felt like we were drowning in weeklies, but my father-in-law renewed my subscription as a birthday gift, and it feels like a sort of homecoming. Last week, I loved Emily Nussbaum’s profile of Marielle Heller, the director of the film adaptation of Nightbitch. I found Heller to be a very inspiring working mother figure, especially seeing how much hard work she had to put in before “making it.” I’m not sure I’ll make it to a movie in-theaters before 2026, but I look forward to seeing Nightbitch on VOD.

On my list of nice things I covet but can’t justify buying on the eve of having bought a house:

• East Fork mugs.

• For our new guest room, this Schoolhouse Stillwater quilt in red, which Instagram knows I want and will not let me forget it. For whom, exactly, am I concocting this cottagecore fantasy guest room in which I will likely never even sleep? I dream of mismatched colorful gingham sheets, a solid linen duvet cover, perhaps this throw blanket at the foot of the bed…perhaps the guest room has become my All Fours motel room? Why is my old yellow and white striped West Elm duvet cover, so coveted in 2012, not good enough anymore? I am really trying to hold off and see if this aesthetic still appeals to me in six months.

• Nice wool! I want to get back into knitting. Will this hobby die a quick death? Save me from scrolling my phone during the violent parts of Say Nothing. I hope if I can learn how to make my daughter a sweater, I will save myself the impulse to buy her $200 European knits, or their fast-fashion sweatshop equivalent.

• Perhaps the most embarrassing item on my wishlist is a Virginia Woolf hat from Womb House Books, which I delayed buying for myself for so long that it is out of stock. Every time I considered buying it, I considered what a ridiculous prick I would feel like wearing a Virginia Woolf hat, and couldn’t imagine where I would possibly feel comfortable wearing such a hat other than to a book reading at Skylight Books.