The Joel Golby Gift Guide, 2025

Hello, I have written a gift guide. Some questions you might have:

Why?

Every year people ask me for help buying their boyfriends presents. Boyfriends are quite hard to buy for, and crucially I kind of just understand boyfriends. I’m not saying this gift guide is just for boyfriends, but I do think it will help you get something nice for the difficult-to-buy-for person in your life, and quite often that is someone in his thirties who has very recently ‘got really into wearing caps’ and knows what xG is i.e. a boyfriend

What is your gifting philosophy?

Great question thanks for asking. I don’t really believe in buying items for the sake of having items – and I am also one of those pathetically sentimental people who can’t bring himself to throw a gift away, because I think objects that have been gifted ‘have an energy’ to them, I currently have a scarf I am trying to offload because it feels too heavy with the weight of itself – and basically I don’t really think just because it’s Christmas you should give someone something that ends up being an object they have to move house with for the rest of their lives, you should get them something good. I don’t think there’s anything on this page that costs more than £100, either. That drives me mad when I read a gift guide that does that. Who do you think I am buying shit for? No. Come on

Have any brands got to you?

No these are all just things I have personally been collecting over the course of the year. Also if someone gets advertised to me too much on Instagram I take it off the list. Isn’t that the most mental illness thing you’ve ever heard

Over the course of the year?

Yeah, year! I put some thought into this! I took ages researching it online!

Alright I have split the gifts into vague sections and here’s a quick way of navigating them:

— Kitchen

— Books

— Booze

— Nice booze

— Whisky

— Wine

— Fragrances

— Incense

— Desk/office things

— Fashion/wearable things

— Football

— Boardgames

— General

— Cards

​​⮑ KITCHEN

I think kitchen things are a nice gift around this time of year but if someone can cook then broadly they probably have all the stuff they need to do that, so you can only really get accoutrements around that. The only exception to that rule is yakumi tins: everyone who cooks quietly wants yakumi tins but they don’t want to fucking pay what yakumi tins cost to get them. So decide how much you love someone and think about if they deserve a set of yakumi tins.

My friend Chris Mandle and I talk about gifting quite a lot and we both agree that a very chic move is to get someone just one thing from the Sabre Paris range (obviously everyone lusts after a full cutlery set, but fuck me. Come on.). We think a good gift therefore is: a butter knife, a pair of tongs, a rice spoon, or some of their chopsticks. I don’t really know what I’d do with this tomato knife but I do know I still quite want one. I can’t really imagine anyone on earth being mad to receive this bottle opener. You get the idea

Particularly ‘east London’ of me obviously but a pretty catch-all gift is an Allday Goods butter knife. They are just a delightful object to behold and come in a presentation box, so they really do make a nice gift. You can get them pretty consistently at De Beauvoir Deli (if they have their coconut macaroons on you should get one of those while you’re there, too).

One of my ‘secret weapon gifts’ is just a Le Creuset spoon rest: they are £17, they are useful, they are good-looking, everyone is wowed by the fact that it’s Le Creuset, I think they tick a lot of boxes (especially ‘tricky-to-buy-for mums’)

One piece of gifting advice I would give is ‘please, stop buying men hot sauce’ (we have enough. There is only so much hot sauce one dish can take. Normally we find a hot sauce we like and stick to it. A box-set with five bottles of hot sauce in it is functionally quite useless) but if you absolutely have to, the best you can get is the Koffiracha from Catalyst Coffee, so get that. And go for a nice brunch and a coffee while you’re there

That said, if you do need a stocking filler: my favourite hot sauce is El Yucateco Chipotle, and the hot sauce I am most intrigued by is El Yucateco Habanero & Coffee, but I have enacted a strict one-in-one-out policy with hot sauce so I’ll have to wait until I’m done with another bottle to get it. They are like £3 each, maximum

My friends Jake and Healey are an irritatingly chic married couple who delight in buying each other the best fucking gifts on earth – they have such a good life together it drives me mad – and this year Healey got Jake this fucking sick stainless steel coffee mug and saucer set and I’ve wanted one ever since. It’s about £15 and it’s going to be the only Amazon link I do on this list: there

No one’s going to be mad at a Beams stacking mug. JUJUHOME (great shop in general btw) also has a great collection of mugs, as does Community Cutlery (the place to get someone a chef’s knife if you’re doing that this year!) with their ZERO Japan ones. I like a mug as a gift but I do think you should gift something to drink out of it at the same time, like how you should never gift a wallet without money in it: Bergamia tea is the best tea, I don’t have an opinion on best coffee but I do like Hard Lines

For some reason, and I can’t explain why, most men just want – they don’t know why but they do – they just want a double Bialetti Mini Express. Do not interrogate it. It’s just a thing. You can get a nice gift set version of it here.

I also personally like this Alessi espresso maker. Mainly because it fucking does three cups. What am I meant to do with one espresso

Not the season for it obviously but if someone has a BBQ they probably don’t know that smoker boxes exist: a little metal box you fill with wood chips (I like these sustainable Welsh ones) to add flavoured smoke to your cook. Prices vary wildly for some reason but you shouldn’t be paying more than a tenner for one. Here’s one for £2.50!

I think a nice ‘take back home with you’ object is the St. John Christmas pudding, which comes with a teatowel and bowl, so it’s actually three gifts in one

This is also the perfect time to gift a cookbook, I think. The blockbuster one I have to recommend to you is my beautiful boy Ben Lippett’s – he gave me the PDF of it back in April and I’ve been cooking from it ever since and, as a result, been making some of the best food of my life. If you’ve seen any of Ben’s videos (or read his Substack, a subscription to which also makes a good if hard-to-explain-on-the-day gift) then you’ll know he’s so good at teaching you a lot of technique with a light touch, and this book is full of it. What I personally like doing it grabbing one ingredient I’ve been wanting to cook with for ages then going home and finding out from the book how I’m going to prepare it, which is how I ended up making a phenomenal fregola and garlic mushroom half-risotto the other day with a raw egg yolk on top. You think I was going to cook that without help? Come on. Anyway: get How I Cook

Three other cookbooks that came out this year that I’d be delighted with: I flicked through Cooking With Vegetables by Jesse Jenkins at my friends Michael’s house and took about 15 photos of the pages in a five-minute window: lots of blockbuster stuff in there. I’d also very much like Long Day? Cook This please. My friend Australian Tom has been cooking some outstanding stuff from Julie Lin’s Sama Sama. You can figure out where to buy all these on your own.

⮑ BOOKS

I think books are a great gift obviously – and please do not give a book without dating it and writing a nice message in the front! There! Is! No! Point! Otherwise! – but I think at Christmas particularly books-as-gifts take on a slightly different texture: you kind of want something quaffable and readable over the Christmas period, rather than something that is going to go home and go on their to-read pile as a chore. Also this is the rare season I prefer new books over old. This is why I tend to prefer graphic novels, or very short new reads, or a fancy magazine. My recommendations then:

— The new Vittles Magazine, with a few words by moi (you can also see my contribution to the Vittles Gift Guide here)

— The new MUNDIAL Magazine, with a few words by moi

— everyone who has not already read The Wager yet wants to read The Wager. You can tell if someone has read The Wager because they have told you a fact about shipwrecks in the last calendar year. If they have not done that: The Wager

— as I say, I love graphic novels this time of year: a nice focused two- or three-hour read and something that hits somewhere between a film and a book. My graphic novel supplier/curator is the man who won the North London Derby for us, Dan Evans, and in recent years he has got me onto: Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class (get this for anyone who is enjoying The Chair Company, I reckon), everything by Adrian Tomine, everything by Charles Burns, and we already loved Dan Clowes over here but he got me Monica as soon as it came out. This year I have asked him for his recommendations and we’ve got: My Favourite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Fields by Kate Beaton (from Hark! A Vagrant, which if you are very online you will remember), and Adrian Tomine’s Q&A. All of these have immediately gone on my Christmas list, as has Sundays by Olivier Schrauwen, which I just think I would like.

— I really like the idea behind Offline Activities, a book of 52 beautifully-presented prompts for things to do away from your computer or phone. Think it’d live quite nicely on a desk, too (you can get an idea of its contents here)

— A bit related: I’ve been really intrigued by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit since Oobah wrote an article about it last year

— used books that make great stocking fillers: I love Ice Haven by Dan Clowes (£12ish) and Short, Short Stories by Dave Eggers (£3ish). You can use AbeBooks, World of Books or eBay, I don’t particularly care either way. There are of course plenty of book recommendations on my podcast!!!!!!!!!!!

If nothing else, please go to a slightly more interestingly curated independent shop if you’re looking to buy someone a book, instead of just Waterstone’s. I always like Burley Fisher in Dalston, London Centre for Book Arts in Hackney Wick (great for ‘ideas books’, if you’re getting a gift for someone creative), and Tenderbooks off Leicester Square. I also do like Libreria in Brick Lane even if sometimes being in there makes me feel, frankly, poor

⮑ BOOZE

My personal philosophy with buying booze for Christmas is: more often than not it should be a sort of freaky silly one that’ll get drunk quickly, not the kind of bottle that is going to collect dust for three years and move house with you twice. Here are some that have caught my eye:

— the things I would do to a bottle of Terry’s Chocolate Orange Bailey’s are borderline unholy

— Evan Williams Southern Egg Nog tastes exactly as silly and Home Alone-y as you want it to and crucially is available from Gerry’s on Dean Street, one of London’s most perfect shops

— listen: my friend David and I had a particularly deranged afternoon/evening doing shots of Sheepdog peanut butter-flavoured whiskey with every pint we had and from what I remember of that I had a great and delicious time

— Whatever ‘Buffalo Trace Bourbon Cream’ is, I want it

— Black Lines Oatnog is the kind of thing you want to be buying two bottles of, not one, because you’re going to run out and you’re going to want more and all the shops that sell it are going to be closed

— honestly? Just get a 12-pack of BuzzBallz (“it’s a women-owned business” — everyone who ever drinks a BuzzBall, inevitably)

⮑ THAT SAID, NICE BOOZE

If they are ‘just getting into beer’ then get them a load of cans of Deya. It’s just the best beer. You can get a big box from the source, and I think a pick-and-mix of 12 cans makes for a great gift.

I also like The White Hag. They do pleasingly mad seasonal beers, too: here’s an egg nog one!

I also also like Queer Brewing (much like Deya: if you see Queer Brewing on tap, get it): here’s a six-pack of their core range, and here’s a fun four-pack that comes with a carabiner

If they are becoming ‘a Guinness person’ then I would gently encourage you away from any Guinness merchandise – no, not even the Percival stuff! Although I will admit the hat is quite good! – and instead get them some interesting stouts. I, like the GOAT @primemutton2000abfr, like London Black, but there are mad ones you can get in bottles, too. Anything that says ‘cherry’ on it and costs £8 is basically going to do you quite well here.

Felix has closed the best bar in the world, Daisy in Margate – taking away my favourite job, ‘writing their menu’ >:( – but you can still get the better-than-bar quality cocktails through the post. Four for £30 is a mad deal.

My favourite bourbon is a Felix recommendation, too: Balcones Baby Blue (£42). Wow I hope no one reads this and buys me a bottle for Christmas this year! That would be sooooo embarrassing!

⮑ WHISKY

I asked the two people I know who like whisky – I am not getting into a tedious debate about how to spell it, sorry – to make recommendations, and they came up with two answers, one short and one long:

Anraj says: “Glengoyne 21 year is one of my favourite ever. Staggeringly good whisky for the price”. You can get a small 20cl bottle of it for about £65. I’m not going to tell you how much a real-sized bottle is.

Johnny Kanga went into full autism mode and gave me the following options: Thompson Bros Blended Scotch, £34, “outrageously good for the price” and “every whisky person has one of these on the go”. Very cool indie/giftable label, too. That’s me saying that.

Glen Scotia Victoriana, £59 if you get it in the Black Friday deals but closer to £80 the rest of the time, “one of the whiskies that got me into whisky. Made with old school methods, ridiculously chewy, tasty and high % to boot. Feels British as fuck, like a plum pudding at Waterloo” you can see why I asked him can’t you Ardnamurchan AD Madeira Release 2025, £66, a real holiday dram: “Christmas cake on a beach in west Scotland with spray coming off the air. The most distinct spirit out there with bags of festive oompf” Glenfarclas 105°, £77, “the original big fella. First ever British cask strength. All berries and spice and sugar. Christmas whisky if it fought in two world wars and picked fights in regional towns with teen incels whilst wearing a Santa hat”

⮑ WINE

This year I vowed to ‘get into wine’ a bit and I have done that a little (essentially the way to learn about wine is to drink lots of wine, which I have managed to do) and one of the great cues for that was Ned Halley’s annual Supermarket Wine book (the 2026 edition is here). It’s a great stocking filler and the way you use it is carry it around in your bag for a few weeks and every time you have a few minutes read about the wines you might like then underline them and then type them up in a big note in your phone (if you know me well enough you can request The Note). Now every time I walk past a supermarket I know a good bottle of wine to get from there, and I am drinking better wine as a result, bosh. I think this knowledge makes a great gift: get the book and a couple of good bottles from its pages, and that’s someone’s Christmas made. Ned’s ranking system is enjoyably arcane – he rates everything out of 10, but weights heavily by how expensive a wine is/he perceives it to be, so sometimes an 8 is actually a magnificent wine that he thinks is £2 too expensive or he has some personal beef with ASDA that year or something – but a couple of decent gift bottles I can pluck from The Note for you are:

Waitrose, Castello Colle Massari Montecucco Rosso Riserva, £17, a “posh Tuscan number” as per Ned that should age fairly gracefully so makes for a good gift

Waitrose, Château Saint-Hilaire Médoc Cru Bourgeois, £16 and available in basically every Waitrose in the world, a Ned ‘10’ that he describes as a “holy grail” that “tastes very expensive”

Co-op, Château Chapelle D’Aliénor, £14 at the moment and from a “declassified sideline” of a grand old château, and next year I hope to drink enough of it that I know what that means

Tesco, Marques De Riscal Reserva, £16, a “top drawer reserva” that will get better in the bottle

I am not recommending white wine as a gift.

If you want to buy champagne or ‘fizz’ then these are the Ned approveds – as you know everyone slightly prefers crémant to champagne at the moment so I personally will be getting that Aldi £8.99 one (apparently it has outperformed Laurent-Perrier in blind tests):

Les Pionniers Champagne Brut, Co-Op, £21.50

Contevedo Cava Brut, Aldi, £5.45

Specially Selected Crémant de Jura Brut 2020, Aldi, £8.99

Gratien & Meyer Crémant d’Alsace Brut, Tesco, £12.50

Chapel Down Brut NV, Waitrose, £28.99

Finest Vintage Grand Cru Champagne Brut 2017, Tesco, £30

The good crémant they do at Norbert’s is here

⮑ FRAGRANCES

I know it’s quite old school and the reason we get so many mad overblown adverts about it around this time of year but I do think a fragrance is a really nice gift at this time of year. Shoot me! Shoot me with a gun! Also fragrances are completely subjective so there’s absolutely no point telling you which ones to buy.

NORMALLY. Sadly I have immaculate and interesting taste in fragrance and literally always smell good, so here are the ones I have liked this year:

My ‘scent of the year’, and it might not have come out this year but I did buy it this year, so it’s my scent of the year, OK? Anyway my SOTY is Brain Dead – Terra Former (on sale at Brain Dead right now but you can find it other places. I got it at Goodhood but not sure they currently have it in stock). It’s just so good: green as hell but interestingly woody as well? And it can go with a t-shirt or a suit. Just a fucking great aftershave. Bye

My SOTY last year was Hinoki x Monocle Scent One but this year I have been sneaking into shops and trying on both Scent Two and Scent Three and I want both of them. I imagine Scent Four is good too I just haven’t tried that yet. Go to Liberty and give them all a go. Take extra wrists

I also like St John by whatever the fuck Haeckels is calling itself now. This mini bottle has lasted me ages

This is more of a stocking filler I suppose but there was a random episode of How Long Gone a couple of months ago where Chris said he’d picked up this new Italian roll-on deodorant and I tried it and obviously it’s gorgeous and I’m a full convert and it’s like, £7 a throw. It’s called Agua de Colonia and we can both pretend you’re going to shop around for it but realistically the easiest place to get it is Amazon

If someone really liked me they would get me Sunspel – Wood Oak!!!!!!!!!!!!

My favourite fragrance of the past two years has been Nonfiction – In The Shower (bought for me by my beautiful friends at Shaad magazine), which is finally back at END. I managed to break the bottle in my friends Joe and Laura Baiamonte’s bathroom and the whole place smelled gorgeous for days. They also have a discovery set which would make a nice gift. I’m getting myself both

Trickett has loads of nice gifts – I would be happy with this hat, gloves, socks, scarf or pasta grater – but honestly pound-for-pound one of the best things you can buy on this list is this £5.50 tube of after-shave gel. Perfect stocking filler, absurdly gorgeous retro packaging, smells amazing.

⮑ INCENSE

I like incense obviously but I also think fundamentally the kind of hard-to-buy-for people this list serves always appreciate it as a gift. My goal with incense is always ‘I want my house to smell like a fancy shop’ and that’s just a nice thing to give to someone. Also fancy incense sort of falls into the perfect gift price hinterland: you’d feel a bit mad spending £30 on something like that for yourself, but buying it for someone else makes it feel like an oddly affordable gift. That for me is the sweet spot. That’s why buying people flowers feels good and buying them for yourself feels expensive. Anyway—

I think for £25 the Seth Rogan scent cone-and-holder gift set is a really nice thing to receive and actually fairly amazing value. Actually! Actually! If you care!

Nippon Kodo Mikan Orange is the incense they use in Aimé Leon Dore stores, which impresses a certain kind of person (38-year-olds who wear logo caps; crypto 20-year-olds who stop in the street to take photos of cars; no one else). Nippon Kodo Signam is one of my favourite ‘censes so it tracks that this one is nice too.

The scent cone tins at Cremate make for an amazing gift – I love Mary Mother of God – but wow are those little things fucking annoying to light. Be warned. Fuck me!

I literally was in a fancy shop over the summer – one of those vintage couture showrooms where everything is spaced out and you don’t even dare ask how much anything is, and no I was not there by choice – and I did actually ask why it smelled so nice in there, and the answer was, simply: Aesop Sarashina incense sticks

This lighter, from one of my favourite shops (Deadstock General Store) is beautiful. If you take it out on a night out you have to wrestle it back off people, which is a sign of greatness. I took it on a stag do once and people referred to me as “the lighter guy” and I don’t even smoke. I also think it would be quite a good gift for ‘Dads’, who are notoriously hard to buy for

This is the honestly about only incense holder I’ve ever seen that has been designed both practically and beautifully (from another one of my favourite shops, JUJUHOME in Hackney Wick). It comes in other colours

Another JUJUHOME banger: the Homework — WATER essential oil has been going triple-platinum in the Muji diffuser in our flat. You can get candles from the same brand here, too

Pound-for-pound the best candle you can buy is from the newly relaunched Milkman Store: gorgeous scents, really nice object, recyclable packaging, and it’s just more interesting than Earl of East. £45 a throw but worth it. You’ll get 60 hours out of that thing

⮑ DESK/OFFICE THINGS

I just think an on-the-desk item is one of the nicest gifts you can give to an adult: it sits there and makes your working space more individual and cool and whenever you see the item you think of the person who gave it to you. I also fear a lot of people’s desks have the same fucking items on them these days because of the way the Instagram algorithm works on people. Squishy smiley face lamp, is it? Groundbreaking. Anyway here’s an attempt at something more interesting:

I’ll never not mention the boy Dan Evans’ artwork: something for Arsenal fans, Sopranos fans and Tekken fans over on his shop

I really like the Instagram account for Public Domain Review, and their print store has loads of cool stuff in it. I really like this one, obviously.

By far one of the coolest objects you can buy a slightly creative person to go on their desk is a fresh box of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies

A few years ago The Strategist asked Amy Sedaris about her 50 favourite things and she said a ‘tear stick’ (“If you put this Kryolan under your eye, you automatically cry. I gift it to teens, because it’s just a blast to use.”), and I have been thinking about that ever since. That’s so mad. That is in your 50 favourite things? That? But also: just for her. I appreciate that.

So this one is just for me: the other night I ended up at Bar With Shapes For A Name, where nothing good happens, and they had these Chalkola chalk markers lying around and you could draw on the tables with them. They, too, were a blast to use. I think for the right person (me.) they’d make a great gift. I also personally would quite like a tear stick tbqh

My preferred pen (now that the Ohto Horizon that I wrote about in Four Stars has been discontinued) is the Ohto GS01 with an Ohto PG-105NP insert. Stay with me now: the Ohto is a beautiful pen that everyone I hand it to loves holding and clicking but for some inexplicable reason it comes with a rollerball by default. Yuk, no, disgusting. So you need to get the needle point insert to be able to draw a true, jet-black, smooth but needle-thin line. Here is the insert and here is the pen (I would recommend silver) from the same website, and you should be able to get both for a smidge under £10. Sometimes when I am feeling generous I order ten of each, screw them both together, and just hand them out to people I know. They always enjoy this. This is how I know it is a good gift, and that I am sane and normal.

I’m never sure a notebook makes a particularly good gift – people tend to buy a notebook as and when they need one, duh – but my personal favourite is the Stalology 365: perfect size, perfect flop, cool calendar thing at the top of every page and a grid layout. I know some people read these guides just to find things to buy for themselves, so there you go. That one’s for you.

I also really like this steel letter opener. Just a thing. Just a nice thing.

One thing I have personally wanted for years is a Penco tape dispenser, sorry if that offends

I also want this Penco bullet pencil and a Penco boxcutter keyring (INCREDIBLY sick object!). Penco.

⮑ FASHION/WEARABLE THINGS

If you’re buying clothes for someone I think you’ll find it hard to mess up going to Blacksmith Store. I like the new ‘Coldbreaker’ selection – especially this scarf, and the slippers, too – but I also just think a nice gift around Christmas is a three-pack of fresh, crisp, delicious new socks, and they have the Healthknit range going. Look at those cream ones! Mammamamma mia!

Also: I was first drawn to this brand by the outstanding and sadly sold out John O’Shea nutmeg beanie (what a perfect object!) but the rest of their stuff is extremely cool too: you’ll again find it difficult to mess up buying someone something from Pellador

I don’t need to tell you Uniqlo exists – ”Uniqlo exists” – but I do have to tell you those Uniqlo C wide jogging bottoms are fucking great

I have a couple of pairs of sunglas