Last minute Gen X holiday gift guide!

Christmas shopping isn't as straightforward as it once was, but with a bit of creativity and fast thinking, you can still find the perfect gift for the Xer in your life.

Until a decade or so ago, shopping for Gen X was the easiest box to tick on your Christmas list. Find out what their taste was in music, books, or clothes, and get them something a few notches this side of the cutting edge of cool. The same straightforward logic applied to video games, movies, television shows, or other things sold on discs or DVDs. 

But now? It's become a seemingly impossible task. It's not just that they don't need anything, it's that they don't seem to want anything. Or at least, they don't want anything that you can buy for them. Part of it is that clothing and electronics have become so cheap (and the phone has taken over pretty much every function that used to be done by a bunch of distinct appliances anyway) but also, the rise of the direct to consumer economy has made the old brand-driven consumerism really hard to navigate.  On top of that, video games, music, movies and television are streamed, and everyone already has all the subscriptions they need. 

So it’s coming up fast on Christmas, and you’re still looking for something special for that special someone who is between, say, their early 40s and maybe pushing 60. Getting these people a gift they’ll appreciate is actually easier than you think, it’s not too late, and you don’t have to cop out and buy gift cards.  

But the first thing to keep in mind is, while nostalgia is fine, it is important to avoid at all costs anything that is Gen X branded, like everything on this Etsy list. You don’t wear the shirt of the band to their concert, and you don’t wear a “I’m Gen X” t-shirt. 

Anyway, here’s a quick list of things the Xer in your life will love, that you can get before Christmas if you act fast (and maybe live close to an Amazon fulfillment centre). 

Books:

Forget about e-books, get these in hardcopy:

Forgotten Work, by Jason Guriel. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It’s a cyberpunk book about Gen X pop culture written in heroic couplets. It’s an absolute must-read. You can try Amazon for pre-Xmas delivery, but I suggest calling up Biblioasis and asking them to expedite you some copies overnight. In fact, ask them to throw in some copies of Jason’s book On Browsing, which is, in a way, his research notes for Forgotten Work. 

You should also strongly consider Michael Barclay’s essential Have Not Been The Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995. While you are at it, get them a subscription to Barclay’s substack, Airplane on the Highway, which is the closest thing you’ll get to an alt-weekly in your inbox.  

Two other great books that you can get from Amazon in the next few days:

Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, by Melissa Maerz. 

Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion, By Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock

Concert tickets:

Everyone loves experiences, right? The good thing about rock music is it’s all 90s acts all the time. The Foo Fighters just announced a summer North American stadium tour.  If you live on the west coast, Dinosaur Jr. is playing some shows celebrating 30 years of “Where Have You Been”; it looks like there are still tickets available. 

But if you really want to go big, grab tickets to somewhere, anywhere, for Green Day’s Saviors (sic) tour, celebrating 30 years of Dookie and 20 years of American Idiot. Also on the bill: The Smashing Pumpkins, the Linda Lindas, and Rancid. How awesome is that going to be.

And speaking of awesome: My sister’s former high school classmate Alanis Morissette is touring this summer, with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Two shows in Toronto in mid-July seems to be the only Canadian stops.

Nostalgia Stuff: 

If they are into vinyl records, you probably already know that and don’t need my help with anything here. But if you want to get a little more exotic,  and you are willing to do a bit of driving, here’s where Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji are your best friends. Punch in a few keyword searches and let the algorithm do the rest. Some ideas to get you going:

Here’s an Atari 2600 console on sale for $140. A purple Gameboy for $100. A Nintendo Entertainment System for $150. Two more Gameboys for $80. A Sony Sports Walkman for $75, A Commodore Vic-20 with tape drive and a bunch of software on cassettes, for $200. 

Use your imagination here, and get creative. If you can think of it as a nostalgia item, odds are someone near you is selling it. And if all else fails, you know what to do: Get yourself one of these, and make your loved one a Merry Christmas mixtape. 

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This will be my last post for Nevermind until after the holidays (though I might put something together between Christmas and New Year if I have a good idea for a piece). 

In the New Year, I have two main projects I want to work through on this newsletter. One is a history of the first culture war, starting with the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, and showing how the war played out over the following seven or eight years.  My main goal there is to show how pretty much everything about our current culture war was prefigured in that period, and that all we really have now is the old culture war plus social media. 

The second project is a sort of analytic history of what I call “the long Eighties” – the period from roughly, the launch of CNN in 1980 to the release of the Mosaic browser for the World Wide Web in 1993. The idea is to treat that stretch as “the last years of analog” and a liminal period birthing the purely digital culture in which we are all now fully embedded. 

Each of those will take up probably a half dozen posts or so (maybe more, it’s not fully planned out), but I will also intersperse that material with some more fun posts, little vignettes or period sketches, like the last one here on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. 

Please let me know, privately or in the comments, what you think and if you have any suggestions. Otherwise,  thanks as always for reading.  Have a safe and happy holiday everyone. - ap