I still get a Christmas stocking. I know, it’s SO lame.

The year that I got married, my mother announced: ‘that’s it, you’re an adult, I’m not making you a Christmas stocking anymore’. I was outraged (“WHAT NEXT? YOU WON’T TAKE BITES OUT OF THE COOKIES FOR SANTA AND THE CARROTS FOR RUDOLPH EITHER? MY GOD, WOMAN”) but then Fox joyfully manfully reluctantly just took over.

So, to help Fox, and because if I want it, you might want it too and it might help your long-suffering stocking-maker, here are some ideas…

A sample pack of scents from LuckyScent. I am a crazed perfume obsessive but in a cautious geeky way, which means I occasionally buy vintage formulations from eBay and Etsy, but I deep-dive research them for months first, on Fragrantica / Basenotes / Luca Turin’s A-Z of Perfumes (which is a GREAT book, by the way).

I love vintage perfumes the way that my Dad loved vintage cars. He would read vintage car magazines as though he was studying for a test. These LuckyScent samples are all new scents from small perfume houses that seem to be interesting beyond the tiresome ‘oh, let’s throw some oud in a bottle’ standard. I am sure my sniffy glands (technical term) will be delighted.

And to balance out all those newfangled smells, Michelle by Balenciaga. I’m deeply in love with two other old Balenciagas, Quadrille and Le Dix, and I am confident Michelle is just as special (despite the teenage-babysitter-in-the-80s name).

Vintage Balenciaga scents smell good, just deeply interesting and sexy and female and more-ish, in a million ways I can’t even begin to compare to the average sugary-vanilla-sparkling-grapefruit monstrosity perfume companies try to make us buy these days. What’s that? I sound like a crochety old biddy? SPEAK LOUDER. TALK INTO MY EAR HORN. HAVE SOME DANISH BUTTER COOKIES FROM THE TIN.

Shashi Tassel Earrings. I am terrible at wearing jewellery, but whenever I see a woman in great chandelier earrings I think ‘dash it, I must try harder’.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon. His book The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay was so breathtakingly good that it made my heart beat faster with joy that it existed.

Cadbury’s Roses Chocolates. I am tres nostalgic for them lately. They’re British and cheap and delicious.

Boggle, because I like it. A few years ago I went to a Female Boggle Night (we probably named it something snappier than that, I can’t remember), and one of said females – Anna – was so extraordinarily brilliant at it, I still think about it. She was seeing words like ‘pulchritude’ where all i could see was ‘put’. I’m not kidding. When she started playing, the ‘AH-HOOOOOO’ chorus to ‘Werewolves of London‘ came on, like Tom Cruise shooting pool in Color Of Money.

 

And lastly, The Perfume Collector: A Novel, because it looks like lovely escapist fun. And right now, anything that makes me not think about the state of the world is pretty damn welcome.