Sherman Ave's Holiday Gift Guide for Those Difficult-To-Shop-For People in Your Life
Thanksgiving was like a week ago or some shit, which means it’s that time of the year again: Time to use your booze money to buy things for other people in order to demonstrate how much you care about them. Just hear those sleigh bells jinglin’! The commercialization enacted upon us by corporate America forces us to spend more and more on a wider and wider swath of people until you’re you’re buying gifts for all sorts of different individuals in your life. Here’s a little help for when gift-giving isn’t as simple as the classic tie for Dad and set of ornamental throwing knives for Mom:
1. Your Ex
Who: So it didn’t work out for whatever reason (your crippling fear of intimacy, their inability to take your night blindness as seriously as it SHOULD be taken), but you still want to let that used-to-be-special someone in your life that you’re thinking about them this holiday season.
What to get them: A ten-minute long incoherent voicemail in which the only phrases that can be deciphered between your drunken, gasping sobs are are “I still love you” and “sorry I tried to poison your cat.”
2. The Punk Ass Nerd Down the Hall Who Keeps Calling in Noise Complaints on You
Who: He knows who he is and he knows what he did.
What to get them: A noise complaint.
3. Your School-Appointed Counselor
Who: They’ve been with you through thick and thin on twelve occasions or fewer and they’ve heard all about what it was like to grow up with a mother who was obsessed with knife-throwing, but you also accidentally told them about the time all of your friends got made at you for smoking for the first time when you were a junior in high school, and now they keep trying to refer you to BASICS. You figure they deserve a little relaxation.
What to get them: Weed.
4. The Weird Cousin
Who: Everybody has one. He’s probably named Dan. He doesn’t make eye contact and hasn’t really aged since he was 13, when he looked like he was about 22. At Thanksgiving, he peels all the skin off of the turkey, eats the turkey, then eats the skin separately. Gross, Dan.
What to get them: Anime? He probably likes anime.
5. The Professor You Want an A From
Who: You proooobably should have studied a little bit more before the second midterm but you did so well on the first one and then Aaron called you and was like “Yo, we’re going to Simon’s later and Sarah is going to be there,” and if Sarah was going to be there you HAD to go because you guys hadn’t seen each other in forEVer and then you ended up going to the Deuce and then you got a 73 on it because you spent the two hours you planned to study during before class throwing up in the shower. You idiot.
What to get them: A fancy card (drop $8 or more at CVS, it’s worth it) with a sincere note thanking them for teaching such an enriching and eye-opening course with a $50 bill inside of it.
6. Kids From You High School Who Are Also On the Quarter System
Who: Like 8 other kids from your high school also went to schools that are on the quarter system, but out of those 8 only about 3 are going to be tolerable to be around and you’re going to be really bored and really lonely for the last month of summer unless you have someone you can get out of the house and away from your mom’s knife-throwing range with.
What to get them: A mass text with no fewer than three (3) Christmas-themed emojis in it that you can later use to send “Yoooo, who’s home?” in early September.
7. Your Academic Advisor
Who: You’ve met with her once or twice. She seems like a nice enough lady, but she never seems to remember what year of school you’re in or what you’re studying, and so her advice has ranged from vague to straight-up terrible, but she controls your registration time or some shit, right? You should probably try to stay on her good side.
What to get them: $15 iTunes gift card.
