30+ Gift Ideas for Pop Culture Lovers
By Stacy Lee Kong
As I noted in last week’s And Did You Hear About link round-up, it is gift guide szn and I am here for it. I love reading a gift guide and I especially love making a gift guide, and have since I worked on my first one as an editorial assistant at Chatelaine in… 2009, maybe? Pulling these stories together feels like shopping with other people’s money, and that is basically my dream.
But…. we are definitely living through the gift guide-ification of lifestyle content. And it’s not just magazines and newspapers anymore. Now everyone has a gift guide, from celebrities to digital-only lifestyle brands to retailers themselves—which, let’s be honest with ourselves here, is a bastardization of the concept. Some of these lists and editorial packages are genuinely useful (NY Mag’s Strategist gift guides will always be a holiday go-to for me, and ditto for Helen Rosner’s food-themed gift guides for the New Yorker), others are more of the love-to-hate persuasion (Drew Magary’s annual “Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog” is a holiday tradition at this point; see also, everything everyone has ever written about Goop). But as more people do these things, I’m noticing an increasing same-ness. Even the newsletter gift guides that are ostensibly from a specific person, with a specific point of view, that I’ve deliberately sought out sometimes feel like they’re featuring similar things. Which I think is a capitalism thing, tbh. As writer T.M. Brown explained in the New York Times last week, “media companies entered the fray more than a decade ago. But the lure of affiliate marketing dollars, which gave them a cut of whatever people bought via hyperlink, has led many to only increase their production of gift guides.” (Now that I think about it, there might also be a conversation to be had about good taste, what we mean when we say that—and whether it’s as unique as we want to pretend. But… let’s come back to that in 2025!)
None of this put me off from making a gift guide, obviously. Like one of the people Brown quoted in their Times piece, gift guides are more of a fun reading experience than a practical source of advice for me, so that’s what I always lean into when I’m thinking of what belongs in the Friday Things version of this story. So: what follows is not necessarily a practical or comprehensive recommendation of what to buy for everyone in your life. It’s entirely possible that no one in your life would want these things! (Which might be okay, tbh. In addition to that NYT story about gift guides, I also recently read a business story about the truly wild number of Wicked tie-in products—Walmart brand mac and cheese?!—and while I’m sure this was not the intended purpose of either piece, together they made a good argument against my most maximalist shopping tendencies 😬.) But, I promise it will be delightful, entertaining and even a little year-in-review-y, because as always, I gravitated toward the items that referenced 2024’s biggest celebrity moments, memes and internet trends. And if you do find something to add to your shopping cart, we can consider that a bonus.
Memes, Jokes, Ephemera
Shirts I Would Personally Wear At Least Once a Week
For Their Gallery Wall
In the Kitchen
Paper Products
And Did You Hear About…
Reminder! Starting in January, And Did You Hear About recommendations will become premium content. If you’d like to support the work I do with Friday Things—and keep getting these curated recommendations—I’m running a 25% off sale until Jan. 10.
The Hollywood Reporter’s recent piece on the demise of UPN, and its impact on Black TV.
The Twitter user who only ever posts photos of her walks in England’s Lake District and what she ate for dinner. (It feels like Instagram circa 2011 in the nicest way.)
This fascinating Slate article that argues internet girlhood can evolve in one of two directions: office baddies or tradwives.
Writer Emmeline Clein’s fascinating two-part series about how women who have had botched plastic surgeries became a new social category.
The Cut on underconsumption core, a still quite niche trend that has nonetheless taken off this year. (The rest of the year in review package is good, too.)
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