very specific recommendations (for winter party goody bags).
introducing a new series...
Hello!
Today I’m debuting a new newsletter series for paid subscribers that I thought up this morning while trolling the aisles of Trader Joe’s in an attempt to assemble not-terrible goody bags for a seven-year-old’s thrice-rescheduled outdoor birthday party.
I’m tentatively calling this new series VERY SPECIFIC RECS (VSRs) and in it I shall be sharing extremely specific recommendations for extremely specific occasions/people/moods.
For example: What to put in a child’s wintry birthday party goody bag.
My recommendations for this series will abide my usual principals of easy, affordable, and not too terribly waste-creating. I am the one doing the recommending, so some expectation of aesthetic persnicketiness, twee trappings, and mild fussiness should be expected, but I will also remain a human. In other words, when talking about kids’ goody bags, I will not be pretending to be a superhero who has the mental capacity, time, or energy to handcraft 25 wax paper lanterns replete with hand-pressed flowers and hand-rolled beeswax candles, carefully strung onto sticks of matching sizes foraged from the nearby pee-drenched tree pits woods. Would that I were.
No, these will be true-to-life recommendations of the sort that humans like me or you might embrace. I am making no claims that these will be universally beloved recommendations, but they will always be genuine. Other topics may or may not include recommendations for nearing-forty-year-old women-who-hate-winter. Or, recommendations for humans-who-like-bar-soap-that-smells-really-good-and-maybe-doesn’t-also-decimate-the-rainforest. Or—spitballing here—recommendations for people-sleeping-in-beds-with-other-people-who-may-or-may-not-snore. Low-stakes, easy recs. Always, they will be very specific.
Where possible, I will include direct links to items, but more importantly I’ll always include the search terms that might help point you in the right direction should you want to shop around, patronize a different retailer, craft your own version of the thing by hand, et cetera, et cetera.
Ready?