The Fourteenth Annual Mindless Diversions Unsolicited Shopping Guide

It’s time, once again, for everybody to come on board the Mindless Diversions Unsolicited Gift Guide train!

Holy cow. Fourteen!

We’ve started watching Christmas movies with Mom on Christmas Eve. So far, we’ve watched Scrooge (the 1970 musical version of A Christmas Carol), The Muppet Christmas Carol, and Elf.

I don’t know what we’re going to watch this year. I’m pretty much a big fan of the different interpretations of A Christmas Carol, though. When I was a kid, I couldn’t believe how mean Scrooge was and didn’t understand why so much of the movie took place in a cemetery. Now? Scrooge is the best part of the first half of the flick and… yeah.

Netflix has a version of A Christmas Carol that came out in 2022 and the main thing that I noticed is that they made Scrooge even eviler. How in the world have we reached the point where writing straight from the story isn’t bad enough? Have we, as a culture, decided that Scrooge, as written, has a point?

BBC One has a version that is, apparently, a horror flick.

So the musical one isn’t the weirdest mash-up of concepts out there.

Typing that out made me wonder if there’s a Die Hard musical. There is.

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We’ve reached the point where the nephews are too old for toys. They’re asking for pre-workout energy powder and Brita filters.

Sigh.

One of the nephews got a copy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid back in 2007. In 2008, he got the sequel. In 2009, we thought “BEST GIFT EVER!” and got the third one in the series. He’s 23 now. We’re getting him Hot Mess. When he was 12, we joked that we’d still be getting him these books when he was a surly teenager.

Now we just don’t know how to stop.

Lucky for us, he’s got a little brother… who is just about the age where we’re going to make jokes about us getting these books for him when he’s a surly teenager.

So we can put off the difficult conversation of not buying them anymore for another decade.

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When it comes to the gifts you may want to give *YOUR* loved ones, I’ve got a handful of recommendations.

Maribou said that she really enjoyed a couple of books this year:

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard tells the tale of the personal secretary to the sun-on-earth worshiped-as-a-god emperor who has been invited to a vacation spot with his boss.

The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed is a 1996 cyberpunk story about a VR reporter who broadcasts not only what she sees and hears to her followers on the ‘net, but what she smells, tastes, and feels. She uncovers an awful secret that the government wants to keep hidden.

The Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson are a delight for kids of all ages. The first one in the series is Comet in Moominland and after the kiddos devour that one, the entire series is charming and delightful. If you’re already hip deep into Moomin lore, you can just get some Moomin plates to eat off of (microwave safe!).

Maribou also picked up the Tove Jansson-inspired Tove and the Island with No Address. A tribute to Tove Jansson with great illustrations, some light peril, and a happy ending.

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I’m a big fan of little silly luxuries that add to a year’s quality of life for a little simple investment. I’ve talked about improving your showerhead and getting gimungous bath towels. Well, half a year ago, Costco was selling beach towels that were even more gimungous. They were 70″ by 70″ or something like that. You can just drape yourself in such a towel. Well, we only bought two and I wish I had bought a dozen and given the extras away for Christmas.

As it is, I can only find stuff like this: an 82″ by 82″ beach blanket. It’s not exactly a towel, though… but it’s close. Maribou points out the Really Big Towel Company that specializes in 100″ by 40″ towels.

The important thing is the luxury that will last for multiple years in exchange for something that looks kinda pricy at first… but we’ve had our really big towels for 6 or 7 years now and they’re still going strong.

You shower every day! Make it a luxurious shower!

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It seems so weird that DVDs aren’t presents anymore. I remember *LOVING* to get DVDs as presents.

One of the movies I wanted to recommend would make a great gift for the old heads in your life was David Fincher’s “The Killer”. Michael Fassbender is an assassin who listens to The Smiths! What’s not to like? Well, it’s available on Netflix. It’s not available on DVD or Blu-Ray, apparently. I found a link to a sketchy site that is most likely engaging in piracy. It’s on Netflix but you can probably get a good joke out of getting him John Woo’s The Killer on DVD. “I saw this back in 1992!”, he may tell you.

I then thought “well, Killers of the Flower Moon will have a DVD” but IT DOESN’T EITHER!!!

The future sucks.

Get your loved one a Netflix Gift Card and tell them to watch whatever they want.

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More practically, Em recommends these heated slipper boots. Is someone in your household a “cold foot” person? These booties might be just what they need. Last time, she recommended a foot warmer that needed to stay stationary. These boots will let you walk to the kitchen and get a snack and you won’t care about the cold linoleum.

As for books, she recommends Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. She described it as telling “the story of serial killer HH Holmes juxtaposed with the story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893” and I checked and this is, like, *NONFICTION*. This actually happened! (Oh, and it’s not the Erik Larson of Savage Dragon fame. It’s a different guy. I checked.)

Erik Larson also wrote about the sinking of the Lusitania in Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. This is one of the linchpin events that changed the world and it never hurts to learn more about those. Forget going back and killing baby Hitler. Go back and prevent the sinking of the Lusitania! I digress.

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Speaking of preventing the sinking of the Lusitania, there’s a card game called Chrononauts where each player is a time traveler with an agenda to change the future. Each player’s agenda is secret, so you don’t know who is trying to do what… but what will you change and what outcomes will you push toward. If you prevent the assassination of John Lennon, he might become a senator and you might actually pass meaningful gun control! But, to pull that off, you kinda have to change the outcome of Reagan’s shooting in 1981.

Or will your goals involve preventing the Lincoln assassination? Blowing up Sputnik on the launchpad? Will you prevent the sinking of the Lusitania? Get your mission accomplished before your opponents do! It’s a good game to discuss history with kiddos or for grownup history buffs.

Another fun game for a group around the table is Bang! It’s a social deduction game, kinda like Ultimate Werewolf, but the roles are a bit more fixed. You’ve got the sheriff, the deputies, the outlaws, and the renegade.

If the sheriff is killed, the outlaws win if there are any outlaws left, the renegade wins if there aren’t.
If the outlaws and the renegade are killed, the sheriff and the deputies win.
(Oh, and you can win even if you’re dead. Just hope that your team wins.)

Nobody knows who is who (except for the players themselves) and you can only shoot the players to your immediate left or immediate right. (But there are cards that can change this up.)

A fun social deduction game that will have everybody yelling at each other.

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Avneesh Chandra recommends A Psalm for the Wild-Built: A Monk and Robot Book. The robots wandered away. One day, one came back. A cozy fantasy book that asks about the meaning of life in a utopia.

Argue with your friends about it!

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And I will repeat what I said last year:

Of course, the reason for the holidays has little (if anything) to do with giving (or getting) presents but it’s always nice to give a loved one a gift that says “hey, I was thinking about you.”

And with that in mind… hey. I’ve been thinking about you. From us and ours to you and yours, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, Non-Denominational Generic Good Wishes, Happy Hanukkah, Good Festivus, Joyous Kwanzaa, and, of course, Merry Christmas.

I hope that you found something above that you’d want to give to a loved one. In addition to all of the above, I still recommend everything we recommended in Unsolicited Shopping Guides of the past and we want you (yes, you!) to put your recommendations in comments. The gifts that you’d most want to give your loved ones and the gifts that you’d most want to receive? We want to hear about them because you never know who is currently pulling their hair out looking for the perfect gift that you (yes, you!) already know all about.

We want to hear from you!

So… what are you giving?