The greatest gift guide of 2025 was inside you the whole time
Mach 3+ gems of affection, friendship and reciprocity for everyone in your life
The Plane back with you once again, kicking things off with a question…
What does it mean to publish the No. 1 Gift Guide across all media, every year, the way Blackbird Spyplane does? A gift guide that is as legendarily useful as it is revelation-rich?
For starters, it means we have fantastic, idiosyncratic taste, and this, in combination with our elite reconnoitering abilities, enables us to find gift ideas for you that would occur to, statistically speaking, no one else on the planet. When you spin through a Spyplane G.I.F.T.S. List, you experience one jolt of pleasant surprise after another, but these jolts come paired with deeply satisfying clicks of recognition: “This is just the thing.”
That’s thanks to our nuanced understanding of what the best kind of gift, at its root, really is: On a literal level, a great gift might be something you buy for someone, or something you make for them, but either way, a great gift will always also be a vector — a vector for your affection for that person, and a vector for what that person’s affection means to you, in turn. This exchange ennobles and enswaggens everyone involved.
When you give someone a truly excellent gift, in other words, any simplistic, one-way notion of giving is obliterated by the powerful feeling that you are yourself simultaneously receiving something tremendous in kind. There is no better name for this profound condition, shared by the giver and the getter, than gratitude.
Our first-ever G.I.F.T.S. List celebrated Giving Intensely Fire Things Sweetly.
Last year’s G.I.F.T.S. List demonstrated that Generosity Is Fundamental To Swag.
Both those lists are full of ideas that rock undiminished to this day. You’d be a fool not to give them another look.
But right now? We’re rolling out the 2025 G.I.F.T.S. List, which is all about Gratitude In the Form of Tremendous Slappers.
Yes!
We’re talking about a FRESH round-up of beautiful / surprising / practical and/or handmade, highly Spyplaney gems — many of which are priced under $100.
There’s links to specific gifts, but there’s also broader gift-giving frameworks, too. Sometimes we buy things because they’re coded by the market as “gifts,” even though they don’t have very much to do with the people we’re giving them to. You can liberate yourself from this autopilot approach without spinning out into uncontrolled chaos by, e.g., choosing one overarching category of characterful things — keychains, say, or bookends, or bud vases, etc. — and then give people different iterations of that thing, based on their own particular vibes & gestalts.
It goes without saying that this is also a great time to give the people whose happiness and well-being you care about most a Classified-Tier Spyplane subscription.
We remain a two-person reader-supported miracle, dropping gems, unbeatable recon and travel intel week in, week out. Since we don’t run ads and never use affiliate links for any of the new clothes —nor any of the new gifts — we cover, none of that would be possible without our readers.
24/7/365, Spy Nation can find Mach 3+ intel on home goods, records, incense and candles, socks, ceramics, hats, and so much more in our…
You can do some elite-tier copping via The 50 Slappiest Shops in the Spyplane Universe and our rundown of Extremely Dope Museum Shops — both great gift resources in their own right.
Access the 2025 G.I.F.T.S. List, broken down into helpful categories, here.
If you’re on a specific Gifting Mission, let us know in the comments, and let’s see if, between us and your fellow Mach 3+ SpyFriends, we can’t come through with solutions.
— Erin & Jonah
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