Uncle

Uncles are a weird and wonderful thing. They’re not parents, so you don’t get any of that pressure. They’re not a stranger, so you don’t get any of that weirdness. The best of them are people who slip you an extra twenty when they’re drunk at Christmas, back you up in fights you shouldn’t be having, and have strong opinions on stuff no-one else in the family cares about. Uncles have oddly specific personalities. That’s exactly what makes buying for them so satisfying, and so damn difficult. The issue is, uncles don’t ask for things. They’ve either got what they want, or they’re too old to want things in a way that makes them affordable. Novelty socks, bottles of tasteful whisky, tool sets and video game consoles; none of that stuff speaks to a person with an actual personality. We’ve never felt good about handing something rack bought over to someone we actually care about. So we did the opposite. We went searching for gifts that would actually suit them. Nothing splashy, but things that have been considered. Gifts that your uncle will open and immediately have an opinion on, because it’s landed in a place that matters to them. We thought of the uncle who can quote song lyrics from records that came out before you were born. The uncle who has a hobby they’ve kept up for years without anyone ever asking. We thought about our uncle who cooks really nicely, drinks really nicely, reads really nicely and would appreciate something that matched. Every product in this guide was run through this simple test. Would we buy this for ourselves, for an uncle we actually know and like? Would we gift it to them on their birthday or at Christmas, or would we just buy it because we knew they’d appreciate it? If the answer to any of those was no, we didn’t stock it. We didn’t want a “gift guide” filled with stuff we could easily get from Amazon. We cut stuff until we were left with things we liked. It’s small. Again, that was intentional. Finding the perfect gift for your uncle isn’t a matter of scrolling through pages of options. It’s about someone taking the time to care. We tried our best to do that.