Hudson Valley West Holiday Shopping Gift Guide

If you want to give Hudson Valley gifts this season and don't live nearby (or if your recipients don't live here), here are a few candidates.
  • I looked for regionally produced items you can order online and have shipped. 
  • I also tried to find a range of item types, from the homey and traditional to the chromium-steel badass.
  • Yes, I would like your money to remain in, or enter, the region where I live.
  • No, no one asked me to do this. 
  • I kept my focus on the west side of the Hudson to the Delaware, from the Highlands to the foothills of the Catskills.
  • Suggestions? Please comment, keeping in mind ease of ordering/shipping specific items, produced on the west side of the Hudson River in Orange, Ulster, and southern Sullivan counties.
1. HUDSON VALLEY HARD CIDER MAKING KIT from WILLIAMS-SONOMA
I met Elizabeth Ryan on a recent country drive, tried some cider, and got to talking. She's got a lot of sense when it comes to apples and land preservation. Hard cider is good, and easy, and this kit makes it even easier. So buy it for the apple of your eye. (Williams-Sonoma also offers Ms. Ryan's Mead Making Kit, which you can buy for your honey.) (You can also help with Elizabeth's fundraising campaign to preserve Stone Ridge Orchard as a working farm.)

2. A REAL, FRESH NEW YORK PIZZA SHIPPED ANYWHERE IN THE US
Prima Pizza, of Cornwall NY, has been shipping pizzas around the country for years. As they say it: "Your pizza is cooked to perfection and sealed in a special package using a unique process. It is then ready to be shipped via FedEx (or other overnight delivery service) right to your door the next day by either 10:30am or 3:00pm. All you have to do is heat/cook the pie to your preference. Buon Apetito!" I haven't had one of their shipped pizzas, but I've had dozens of their oven-fresh ones, which are true high-quality New York pies. December 26th dinner, anyone?

3. ORANGE COUNTY CHOPPERS MEN'S SLEEVELESS WORK SHIRT
There's no shortage of cool gear available online from the nation's best-known custom chopper designers and fabricators (their new show premiered on CMT last week), but this particular shirt is modeled by patriarch (and secretly nice guy) Paul Senior.

4. WOODCARVING by CLAY BOONE
Custom woodcarving by a true master. This is a consultative purchase with prices in the high three figures (and up, I assume), which will make sense when you look at the pictures of Mr. Boone's work.

5. THREE thingCHARGERS
It's a plug-in charging station for your devices that looks like an outlet and leaves your outlets free for, like, blenders and whatnot. Switchable "power tips" make it work for any device (the tips store in the back), it has two USB ports on the bottom just in case, and there are NO WIRES. Your phone, tablet, etc., stands directly on the thingCHARGER. You can even plug them into each other to charge more than one device on the same outlet -- again, without taking up the outlet! Invented about a mile from where I'm typing this, by some nice people I know. It's launching on indiegogo (having reached 800% of its funding target), and pre-orders will ship in 2014.

6. A MASK from INTO LEATHER
Sugar Loaf, NY, is an artisans community making everything from soap to furniture. If you can't get there, many of the manufacturers, like Paula and Elie Aji of Into Leather, ship their products. If you're into leather but not into masks, you can also get a jacket or a cool bag or a belt or other clothing and accessories. You're into leather, right?

7. THIS COOL BRONZE BIRD FEEDER from BRIDGES OVER TIME ANTIQUES
Bridges Over Time of Newburgh, NY offers its inventory through 1stDibs, which will ask you to create an account to view prices. This piece caught my eye, but there's plenty more where that came from.

8. A PRINT from HUDSON VALLEY GALLERY
Order by phone for prints of original paintings by Hudson Valley artist Paul Gould, like this vibrant view of a local scene.

9. GO ARMY BLACK KNIGHTS IPAD CASE
For the sports fan/patriot/aspiring officer on your list, the West Point Black Knights lend their distinctive team identity to all manner of cool gear, clothing, and more.

10. A US NAVY SHIP CAP from MILITARY GIFTS
Hint: if you're shopping for me from this Port Jervis concern, here's the ship to specify.

11. 2014 CALENDAR from MOHONK IMAGES
Give your family and friends the chance to look at the beauty of the Mohonk Preserve year-round, wherever they are. (The photos are ridiculously gorgeous.)

12. MOISTURIZING LOTION from HUDSON HARMONY
Based in New Windsor, NY, these soaps and lotions are a favorite at area farmer's and craft markets.

13. A PAIR OF MUCKLUCKS from ROCK RIDGE ALPACAS
Furry friends from Chester (home of Neufchatel cheese and the legendary horse Hambletonian) have been shorn to provide your loved ones with these comfy high-top slippers.

14. A POUND OF COSTA RICAN TARRAZU COFFEE from MONKEY JOE
"One of the world's greatest coffees - light, clean flavor, wonderful fragrance. Silky, full bodied with rich acidity. Well-balanced with a lingering aftertaste." Rain Forest Alliance certified, and roasted in Kingston, NY.

15. SEEDS from the HUDSON VALLEY SEED LIBRARY
"Ken Greene started the Seed Library in 2004 while working as a Librarian at the Gardiner Public Library. Having developed a strong interest in preserving heirloom seed varieties, he decided to add them to the library catalog so that patrons could 'check them out,' grow them in their home gardens, and then 'return' saved seed at the end of the season." They've since branched out in their Accord HQ, offering apparel and artwork in addition to seeds.

16. BALANCING BAMBOO WINE BOTTLE HOLDER from STYLO FURNITURE & DESIGN
Your mother-in-law likes a nice bottle of wine, doesn't she? This holder, hand-made in Cornwall-on-Hudson by Randy Hornman, makes a great conversation piece and offers a beautiful way to display your favorite vintage. Keeps the cork wet, too, if your MIL's not cracking it open right away.

17. PINT GLASSES from NEWBURGH BREWING COMPANY
When I started this list, the guys at Newburgh Brewing didn't have an online store to share their great logo designs with the wider beer-loving world. Their beer and ale is served for miles around (as well as in their incredible taproom) and now you can get the right glass to enjoy it at home -- or make another brew feel better about itself.


•

Assembly Required

I.


We have a neighbor – single mom to a four-year-old. She works full time, owns her house where she lives with her sister and the kid. She can install molding. She knows how to demo sheet rock and clean it up proper. Ceiling fan? She could do it.

She made fun of me this weekend because I chose to use an innovative technique to attach the front panel of my deerproof Plant Containment Unit to the body of the thing. She would have used a hinge. I went with the plastic zip ties. Because I moved AWAY from the upper east side, thank you very much, and I don’t need a hinge to open the damn thing. That’s what the can is for. I use another zip tie to close it.

I hope that when Lopsides crashes through her yard chewing on a cucumber, wrapped in chicken wire, the lashings and tomato stakes that make up my garden fence trailing from his farkakte antlers, that I am there to take a picture to share with you, O Internet.

-------------------------

II.


In our town, on May 28th each year, the A/C Man comes through the main street on his great waggon that is drawn by four and twenty white oxen and piled to the canvas with the shiny bodies of sparkling new air conditioners. These his strapping sons heave down to the children of the town who give their tuppence to the sister, a barefooted redhaired girl in gingham who prances along with a tin pot for the money and who always keeps the change. The town children don’t seem to mind; it is the season. Hoisting their massive metal burdens to their narrow shoulders they stagger gamely home up the side streets on the hill, calling to their parents “Mother, Father, come see! It’s the Haier Koolblast ZX90! Do come, and bring baby Zillah, I’m sure she’d like to see her face reflected in its surface!” And the parents come, leading the little ones, who gurgle at the corrugated knobs and who must be chided for trying to lick the glistening side panels.

Then the Dads collect a few choice items and, with a prodigious will and profusion of sweat, take the window sashes out wrong, attach the brackets like a crazy person, slam the fucking thing into the godDAMN window frame, remove it because it’s WRONG, bend a couple of pieces of metal to fit around the projecting thing in the non-standard window, then carefully put…it…backDOWNONTHEIRMOTHERFUCKINGPINKY and finally shove a piece of plywood into the open space above, drive several screws into it haphazardly and assume they’ll figure it out in autumn. Fuck. They need a beer.

The A/C Man eats last fall’s thawed venison with the mayor and they laugh late into the night over a tankard of mead while watching Blazing Saddles on the TiVo. His children tend the air conditioners, making sure each has its ration of freon and straw, before they fall asleep under the wain, dreaming of sunshine and shade.

-------------------------

III.





















When the Chattanooga Iron Works closed down, the men walked the high-summer streets forlorn, their denim-ticking overalls picking up the red clay dust, until they came to Herd’s Garage. Clement Herd sat out front on a crate happy as a pig in shit and they stood around and one of them pulled out a mason jar half full and they passed it until finally someone said “Clem, why the hell are you so all-fired happy?” And Clem pulled out the blueprints for the cast iron and steel Char-Griller Super Pro Charcoal Grill/Smoker and all the men threw their caps in the air and they opened the shop that very week.

And, much later, I got one of those and I put it together. And I made this:



May all your parts fit snugly, and may all your washers be included in the original packaging this summer.


•

Seasoned

I was washing our cast-iron skillet tonight and noted the surface, which is a little rough. Not sandpaper rough, but it’s not super-smooth. My parents’ two cast-iron skillets—I think they got them for their wedding fifty years ago—have interior surfaces that are the envy of baby’s cheeks, so smooth they are. If you enlarged the cooking surface of one of these pans ten thousand times so that it was 2.36 miles across, the largest imperfection would be the size of a grain of sand. That’s smooth, brother.

Years of cooking for a spouse and five children and uncountable relatives and friends will do that to a pan. Scraping hard steel spatulas across the comparatively softer iron wears slowly away at the dark metal. Mountains of eggs. Continents of tomatoes, zucchini, hamburgers, grilled cheese. How many turns of wrist, how many flips of pancake, to burnish the metal until it becomes that featureless iron plain?

At Weight Watchers we talk about how easy it is to equate food with love and acceptance and how easy it is to make food the shortcut to feeling loved and accepted. And how that’s not the best way to go about things. But look at the evidence of the skillet. How many hours, how many accumulated years spent before that hunk of metal, scraping, scraping, scraping it smooth in order to provide for loved ones? How is that texture not a message of love?

Our pan is new, just four years old or so. The tiny jags in its surface make the steel spatula ring like an old Western Bell telephone when I cook. It’s already incrementally smoother than when I bought it. But I’m in no rush. It’s not about always being able to cook on a perfectly smooth surface. It’s about making the surface smooth.


•

Christmas Part XXXVIII: The Encheapening

Hi everyone! You're all going to get Christmas presents from us this year! But we're going to spend VERY MODESTLY. (Read: some of you might get HAPPY THOUGHTS directed your way! Merry merry!)

That circumstance is a result of one of those empty bank account situations that happen once or twice a year. Could it have anything to do with us buying a MODESTLY PRICED but still BRAND-NEW car? Why, yes, yes it could. Could it have something to do with rapidly up-spiraling health care costs and a new health plan, a hospitalization and some new prescriptions? Sure it could. How about the money we had to front to the plumber for the first of several repairs related to a leak? Yessssss. Anything else? Gas $3.24 a gallon and a combined daily commute of about 136 miles? Toss that in the hopper. How about a little oil heat? Why not?

We keep looking for evidence of our profligacy, but it's nowhere to be found. After moving upstate, my wife sold the caviar hose, the truffle flinger, and all but one of our diamond-encrusted hookers. We took back the shoe dispenser and the Armani tissues and the complete set of life-sized farm animals executed in Amedei Porcelana chocolate. Gone are the vintage solid gold nosepickers that once belonged to a notorious governor of Oklahoma, not to mention a Jeff Koons heart sculpture AND Jeff Koons's actual heart (sold it to a medical school in Grenada just to cover a heating oil delivery).

So, yeah, cheap holidays this year. It's just that, even recouping the funds from the loot acquired during our New York years, there's occasionally this HOLE just over the horizon. Sometimes it allows us a look inside. It's so big, and so deep—if we could figure out a way to sell it by the cubic yard, we'd be rich.


•

What You're Gonna Need

You've been renting for eight or nine years and you want to move out of the city and get a house. You can do this, because you can get your landlord to buy out your lease, because even though the rest of the country is hurting, home prices in Disneyland New York are still strong. Your shopping list:

cars (2)
shovels (2)
ice melt (50#)
rakes (4.5)
lawnmower, ride-on (1)
paint (6 gal.)
cat's paw (for prying up nails, carpet, etc.)
lock de-icer
garden hose
sprinkler
cinder blocks
duct tape
bike
kayak
dog
more furniture
hangers (2 dz)
televisions (2)
Duraflame™ logs (4)
needlepoint: "bless this house" (1)
kids (2.5)
seeds
twine
welcome mat

I'll try to keep this list up to date. Feel free to add your own findings in comments.

•

The Trouble with Raising a Five-Year-Old Hippie

Last time we went up to New Paltz, a few weeks ago, for the fingerpainting, the Boy got out of the car, filled his lungs with village air, and announced “it smells like granola here.” That’s pretty much what anyone of my generation would say: New Paltz is redolent of crunchy, crunchy granola for certain.

So this past weekend when we took a jaunt up thataway to buy a present for someone at a charming, non-patchouli-scented-but-still-earthy boutique, the Boy got out of the car, took in a big gulp of village air, then froze, pointing across the street like a wide-eyed Gordon setter flushing a covey of rainbow-colored pheasants. “Look at those great shirts!” he yelled.

On the way home, as we sang "Yellow Submarine" for the sixth time and planned his next yoga class, a peace-loving, organic-minded woman in the passenger seat and I agreed: it will be sad/funny when our tie-dye-wearing son goes into class and shoves some other kid during circle time while they’re talking about the seasons.


•

Posturban Summer Uniform: Year Four

After four years, I've finally got it down! Take this & this:















Add this & this...






















Then walk out of your house on Saturday morning and see your neighbor's sister's boyfriend walking out of their house wearing the same thing.


UPDATE:


•