From the editor

This issue, we decided to make ourselves useful for once, and solve your Christmas present shopping in one fell swoop.

Crammed on pages 8-13, you’ll find 100 ideas for gifts that are $100 or less and that you can, if you are so inclined, order online from the comfort of home.

Rather than directing you to sites like Amazon, we decided to include only New Zealand-made gifts, with some wiggle room for businesses headquartered here, who find they need to have some parts manufactured offshore. (If you’d like to quibble with me over the ethics of this, please feel free to email me, as I have been agonising over it for weeks and no one in my household wants to discuss it any more.)

We also decided not to be too prescriptive about who each gift is appropriate for. I suspect, for instance, that a chocolate-coated tarantula might appeal as much to a teenage boy as to a woman in her 70s.

(I am lucky enough to know some very silly women in their 70s).

Similarly, I can think of a few rough-and-rugged types who really appreciate a delicately scented hand soap or luxurious, high thread-count bedding. So you won’t find blokes’ and sheilas’ sections, or meek and mild suggestions for your nana.

What you will find is plenty of ideas for things to buy those people in your outer circle – teachers, workmates, kind neighbours, favourite bus drivers, friendly dairy owners – who you might not actually know that well, but who illuminate your life in all sorts of ways.