emo gift guide = sunny puffers & honey candles & daycations

if wishes were 🐟🐠

square one.

Some Christmases are loud with nutmeg and tinsel and new pajamas. Spoon nog, a pheasant¹ killed by a dank uncle, and flour browning fast on cast iron. These are Decembers I remember. The ones with scores of cards with baby Christs. Cards pulled from shoeboxes, and placed like tiny sawhorses before battalions of encyclopediae. If a lady was getting older, in those now olden days, she might have four decades worth of cards with puppies in Santa caps and stoic snowmen and triangle trees with glitter long gone, all dented with the ballpoint cursive of our last century.

As a baby writer, I was enthralled by the herds of cards, and the subtle differences between sign-offs like, Love you so much, and Wish we could be there, and a simple family name in plural, like The Bontempses. I sensed the anxiety in multiple exclamation points (Miss you!!!!). But amid the paper greetings, softly snorting at stamping at us to reminisce, it was the gifts, meticulously home-wrapped, and set like ex…