The Pen Friend Paris Christmas Gift Guide 2023

Things of comfort and joy

Dear Friend,

The holiday season is upon us! The temperature has dropped right down here in Paris and yesterday we even had a few plucky drops of snow.

To mark the approach of the end of year and to thank YOU for being my pen friend, I have put together the Pen Friend Paris Christmas Gift Guide 2023. I hope it will bring you some practical inspiration and a whimsical sense of abundance.

As a Pen Friend, you will know that my letters focus on French culture, cultural differences, travel, art, books and storytelling. The gifts I have selected reflect these themes and many of them have been directly referenced in this year’s letters. A lot of them are books!

I hope you enjoy. Please reply in the comments with what’s on your Christmas list this year. And please do also let me know if you buy something off the gift list!

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The Pen Friend Paris Christmas Gift Guide of Abundance and Joy

For ease, I am dividing the list into categories. Where relevant, I link to related past Pen Friend posts.

Books

As you will know, every week I include a ‘Thirty-second book club’ feature where I write about what I am reading that week, and often my thoughts on it. Books are very often top of my wish list, and so I am beginning the Pen Friend Paris Christmas Gift Guide of Abundance and Joy (PFPCGGoAJ, for short) with some recommended books. 

First, some of my favourite books I’ve read this year:

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

I just finished this quietly epic tome by George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans as she was really called. The book’s full title is ‘Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life’ and it is set in the 1830s, though written some 40 years later. It follows the lives of various inhabitants of a fictional town in the English midlands, focusing particularly on Dorothea Brooke, an intelligent and idealistic young woman from a well-off, landed family, and Tertius Lydgate, an intellectually ambitious young doctor who believes in scientific discovery and progress. Through these two and a cast of other interesting characters, Eliot explores themes that still feel very much relevant today—from the power of class, money and debt, to what makes a happy (or unhappy) marriage, to technological change, small-town gossip and how to live a life imbued with meaning. Throughout, we are encouraged to consider the interplay between the characters’ internal thoughts, feelings, beliefs and assumptions, the immediate community in which they live, and the parameters laid out by society as a whole; towards the end of the book, the author writes “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that is it not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” I studied English literature and French at university, and I was meant to have read this novel back then, but never managed to finish it. I am now very glad that I did, and I think it would make a fine gift for a keen reader in your life!

• The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

This next title came from my dear friend and wonderfully supportive Pen Friend reader, Kathy. In late February, she sent me an email with the subject line: “M. F. K. Fisher''. I had sadly also never heard of this author who W.H.Auden described as America’s greatest writer. She was a Californian who spent many years living in France and who wrote about food. Or rather, as far as I can tell, she wrote about life as viewed through the prism of food and drink and dining. Here’s what the author herself said about The Gastronomical Me, the 1945 collection of essays I read earlier this year.

"People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do. They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it."

NB: Later this year I read her book about her time spent living in Aix-en-Provence, called Map of Another Town. It’s also wonderful. I have asked for another of her books, Consider the Oyster, for Christmas this year. 

• The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

I first discovered Hessel’s work through her excellent podcast, The Great Women Artists, and as I write this I have just learned that there is an accompanying Substack newsletter: The Great Women Artists. Woohoo! Hessel's book revisits E. H. Gombrich's bible of art history, The Story of Art, but this time focusing on (often overlooked) women artists. It's a beautiful book filled with glossy reproductions of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day. As the writer put it: “Artists pinpoint moments of history through a uniquely expressive medium and allow us to make sense of a time. If we aren’t seeing art by a wide range of people, we aren’t really seeing society, history or culture as a whole”.

• Changer l'eau des fleurs (or ‘Fresh Water for Flowers’) by Valérie Perrin

A novel that was recommended to me by my therapist, who is a very dynamic and life-affirming woman. It’s called Changer l’eau des fleurs (Fresh Water for Flowers) by Valérie Perrin. It’s about a woman named Violette, roughly in her forties, who was born an orphan and later entered a marriage with a mean and selfish man. For years they operated a level-crossing, before it was automated. Then they went together to be the guardians of a cemetery of a small village in Burgundy. He leaves her one day and she creates her own cosy little life in the cemetery house, punctuated by little treats like herbal teas, her pink dressing gown and a glass of porto each evening. Despite being literally set among the dead, it is a beautiful, life-affirming read.

• Unbowed, by Wangari Maathai

Earlier this year I went to Kenya for two weeks, where my partner’s family is from. After that trip I read this memoir by this scientist and activist who was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Some years before her death in 2011, she wrote this memoir, in which she talks about her unrelenting fight to protect Kenya’s biodiversity, while also pushing for social equality and inclusion.

• Economics: The User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

Written by a South Korean economist who’s a professor at Cambridge University and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). As I wrote earlier this year, I felt that I lacked rigorous knowledge when it comes to the economic aspect of politics and society. It was an excellent underpinning in the key principles and schools of thought. All laid out so plainly and thoughtfully: “Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you, or your claim on particular amounts of the society’s resources.” Super!

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

An oldie but a goodie to end on. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this for the first time this year. That man sure knew how to spin a yarn! Though the Paris he wrote about was the Paris of 1789, and he was writing some 80 years after that, with its larger-than-life characters, it still feels somehow familiar. The same goes for the depiction of London, with its businesslike order, but also its eccentricities.

I keep all my reading of the year logged on a Google spreadsheet. In 2024, I will be sharing the next version of my reading spreadsheet with Pen Friend paying subscribers. If you are among those, I hope you will like it! If you’re not, but you are willing and able to spend a few pounds/dollars/euros per month on these letters, then I would love it if you became a sponsor.

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French pharmacy

Earlier this year I wrote about the cultural significance of pharmacies in France.

Below is a list of my top French pharmacy products, which range from the useful to the entirely frivolous.

• Avène brumisateur, spring water spray.  I once went to a dermatologist who told me I should be washing my face exclusively with mineral water and only using high-end products from the French pharmacy. This was her number-one recommendation, a mineral water spray for the face. Delightfully ridiculous!

• Avène BB cream. Excellent light foundation to give a slightly glowy face.

• Caudalie ‘beauty elixir’. Another spray for the face. A ‘multi-purpose mist’ that does I’m not sure what but makes your face smell nice and expensive. Thank you to to dear pals Agnes and Samira for the tip.

• Caudalie foaming face wash. I occasionally buy this face wash when I’m feeling fancy, and I’ve never regretted it yet.

• Embryolisse Lait-Crème Concentré. Top-notch moisturiser, my friend asked me to bring her three bottles to New York.

• PurEssentiel lavender sleep spray. The name is misleading. This is an entirely unnecessary aromatherapy spray that you can put on your pillow or sheets. I nonetheless find it a comfort to spray on unknown pillows when travelling.

  

  Face-shape defaults as laid out in a French beauty book from the Seventies (“sad nose”, “galoche chin”)

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Artistic and creative gifts

I have written about many talented artists and writers in my letters this year, some of whom I am lucky enough to be friends with. Below find some people whose work you can buy or sponsor as a wonderful gift (NB: As I was writing this I realised that some of these are TECHNICALLY books, but we will keep them in this category):

• A book or drawing by Tor Freeman,

  The ReposiTORy
  << This is her Substack which you ought to subscribe to. A very talented and laugh-out-loud funny London-based illustrator and comic maker. You can browse her books and buy some fabulous prints on her website. I bought the book Olive and the Embarrassing Hat for my baby niece.

  

  Oncle Fabi by Tor Freeman

• A subscription to In Writing by

  Hattie Crisell
  Hattie is a very intelligent, engaging and funny person and journalist. She is also my friend and I like to bask in her reflected glory. I recommend her podcast In Writing to anyone who is interested in things literary. Or go one better and give that person the gift of a paid subscription to her Substack. They can then join her regular ‘Creative Hours’, an online writing get-together on Google Meet, plus more lovely writing community goodies. I myself am a proud paying subscriber.

• Sutanya Dacres is the creator and host of the podcast Dinner for One and she is also my friend (basking in reflected glory again!). As well as being clever, funny and indecently glamorous, she is also the author of the memoir Dinner for One: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me, a delightful read about navigating adversity, the particularities of Paris and, of course, food.

• Children’s books by Jion Sheibani. A multi-talented Brit in Paris was once my boss. I am not sure how helpful I was as an employee, but I am a VERY enthusiastic friend and cheerleader of her fantastic children’s books, which emphasise play and empathy. For the teen (or indeed adult) in your life, buy The Silver Chain, Sheibani’s debut Young Adult story, written in beautiful verse and illustrated by the author.

• Anything drawn by Christelle Téa. Last Christmas I bought an art book featuring the drawings of a young artist called Christelle Téa. She studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, draws from real-life creating lively, characterful impressions of striking scenes in Paris and beyond. I watched an interview with her where she told the story of how she learned to draw. Her parents came to France from Guangdong, a province in the south-east of China. They ran a restaurant and the little Christelle was always there while her parents worked. When she complained she was bored, her parents gave her a waiter’s pad and pen and she started drawing. Her mother later joked “I should have given you a calculator!”. She has just released a book called Au Bonheur (FR) with her mother Lilliane, featuring her mother’s recipes and Christelle’s drawings.

• My things: Pen Friend letters are decorated with my own artwork. If you’ve seen anything you like, let me know! I sold my first original works and prints this year. You can also gift someone a paying subscription, which from next year will open the door to wonders like my reading list, deep-dive articles, as well as a hand-painted card!

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Stationary and art supplies

Here are some of my favourites; they make great gifts.

2. Muji notebooks - simply the best, in my opinion. I have a very special place in my heart for this one. Good for scribbling of all kinds.

3. Clairefontaine Pollen correspondence cards and envelopes (for pen friends!)

4. Windsor & Newton watercolours

5. A Kuretake double-ended ink brush ben

Cards to Pen Friend sponsors with Windsor & Newton watercolours

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Posh Paris hotel swag

For my work as a travel writer, I have stayed in more than 50 hotels here in Paris. This means I have seen some of the best posh swag available. Some gift ideas for the swanky-minded:

• The Ritz dressing gown: The iconic peach cotton dressing gown, which costs more than most dressing gowns, but quite a lot less than a night at the Ritz!

• Hotel Costes toiletries and perfumes. Would you like your house (or body) to smell like a sexy Parisian hotel? The products of Hotel Costes have all that you would want in a musk.

• Yule not forget this one in a hurry — the Hotel de Crillon yule log. Order the poshest yule log in Paris from the legendary luxury hotel on Place de la Concorde. You can expect fromage frais mousse coupled with a Tahitian vanilla rice pudding layer followed by a light Joconde sponge base!

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Metaphysical and spiritual

These final gifts take us into the non-physical realm. They’re not always easy to wrap, but they still score high for customer satisfaction.

• Give yourself the gift of a phone-free sabbath once a week

• Spend time with a dog

• Share Pen Friend!

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Thank you for reading The Pen Friend Paris Christmas Gift Guide of Abundance and Joy! I hope it helped give you some ideas, if you were in need of some.

Christmas robin by Hannah Meltzer

Next week I’ll be in Marseille, and all being well I’ll write from there.

Have a lovely week!

Yours,

Hannah