I have thousands and thousands of rules about gift giving, and I am going to tell you about every single one.

First, the gift should be extremely thoughtful. Duh, of course, right? But that’s why you can’t just go off an Amazon wishlist, or even what the person has told you she wanted. Instead, you have to listen all year round for hints as to what he/she is truly wishing for. The goal is to give a gift the person has never seen before, didn’t even know she wanted, and yet—now that it’s unwrapped—can’t imagine life without it ever again.

Second: the goodness of the gift is directly proportional to the difficulty of obtaining it. This means that the best gift is something you made in secret over several months, such as a needlepoint portrait pillow of your best friend’s cat. Failing that, however, you might order it from Australia, or from a bakery in Ohio where the owner speaks pidgin English, or at the very least, off Etsy. The gifts in my gift guide generally break this rule, as they are mostly easily obtainable, and many of them qualify for Amazon Prime shipping. (The links below are not, however, affiliate ones.) A corollary to this rule, though: price does NOT count toward the difficulty quotient. Extravagantly expensive gifts mean you’re throwing money at the problem, and that’s just vulgar.

Third: the gift should ideally be under $50. Ideally, it should be something that was originally exorbitantly priced, but you miraculously managed to get for a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost. The reason for this is a two-parter: (a) it’s no good to make the other person feel uncomfortable by spending far more on him than he did on your gift, and (b) a tight budgetary framework inspires creativity. This rule can of course be broken on any whim, but it is only broken once in this list, and even then you can easily get a less expensive version.

As you can probably imagine, my fervor for explaining these rules is only increasing, so I must stop somewhere, or else we’ll spend all night discussing grosgrain ribbon and the abomination that is the gift bag. So, on to the gift guides.