The best kind of gift, argues Sunset's latest holiday shopping guide, is one you'd happily keep for yourself. Their annual roundup of food gifts leans on small and regional makers, mostly from the American West, and focuses on affordable indulgences rather than big-ticket gadgets — the sort of things you can buy in multiples without wrecking a December budget.
The guide is organised around the kind of eater you're buying for. Sweet tooths get their pick of small-batch confections, Italian food lovers get pantry staples and pasta-worthy ingredients, and the adventurous eaters on your list are covered with more unusual flavours and meal kits. Cooking tools make the cut too, positioned as practical gifts that still feel like a treat. The common thread is provenance: the emphasis is on buying from local and independent producers rather than defaulting to supermarket gift sets, which the editors suggest makes for a better-looking holiday spread and a more thoughtful present.
There's also a practical warning buried in the intro: some items on the list are selling out quickly, so anyone planning to order before the holidays should move early rather than leaving it to the last shipping window. Sunset also notes the standard disclosure that it earns a commission on some purchases made through its links, so it's a shopping guide in the literal sense.
For travellers, there's a useful angle here beyond December gifting. Regional food makers — the hot sauce people, the chocolatiers, the small pasta producers — are exactly the shops worth seeking out when you visit a place, and the guide doubles as a directory of Western US producers worth visiting or ordering from year-round. Edible souvenirs solve the classic gift problem: nobody needs another mug, but almost everyone appreciates good olive oil, interesting spices or a meal kit that turns an ordinary weeknight into something a bit special. Keeping a mental note of the small producers you stumble across on a trip, then ordering from them come the holidays, is a tidy way to make your travel budget do double duty.
The timing matters too. With popular items already running low ahead of the holidays, the guide functions as an early-December nudge: sort your food gifts now, and you avoid both sold-out disappointments and express-shipping fees. And if you're hosting rather than travelling this season, the same logic applies — building a spread from a few standout local products tends to impress more than a table of generic centrepieces, at a similar or lower cost.
