Forget the winter magic, twinkling lights, and warm nights by the fire. For many, the holidays and the dark cold months that follow are a time for existential dread, seasonal depression, and, especially now, fear of what's to come.
The following is a literary gift guide for the melancholy, the grieving, and those looking for small embers of hope to nurture into a full-blown flame.
For Emotional Eaters
The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book: 100 Best Recipes from The Star Tribune’s Holiday Cookie Contest by Lee Svitak Dean and Rick Nelson
A fleeting but satisfying antidote to end-of-the-world despair is the simple, glorious alchemy of refined sugar, flour, and butter mixed together, scooped in tablespoon-sized lumps onto a sheet pan, and baked at 350° for 8-10 minutes. With a hundred variations on this balm, The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book (University of Minnesota Press) makes a great gift for let’s-bake-our-feelings folks. This hardcover collection of user-generated content is divided up into chapters by cookie type: sandwich, drop, cutout, refrigerator, bars, and a “More Cookies” catch-all for the uncategorizable, like chocolate salami, chai meringues, and nutmeg sticks. Throughout the book, artful photographs by Tom Wallace showcase raw ingredients, extreme close-ups of baked goodies, and one weird picture of a cookie pile clutched in a non-hand-model’s shabby-cuticled dry-skinned grip. The cookbook closes with a chapter on cookie memories, with charming essays about regional classics such as sandbakkels, Russian tea cakes, and molasses crinkles.
For All Residents of North America
This Land: The History of the Land We’re On by Ashley Fairbanks, illustrated by Bridget George
The inimitable Minnesota born and raised Ashley Fairbanks is an Anishinaabe artist, writer, organizer, digital strategist, and now picture book author. Her debut, This Land (Crown Books for Young Readers) contains graceful prose that covers a simplified peoples’ history of the North American continent alongside visual interpretations of North American landscapes and big-eyed, rounded, joyful-looking people rendered by Bridget George, who is also an Anishinaabe artist and author. This Land can be wrapped up and placed under the tree for kids, or for any adult who’s going to mourn the end of Secretary Deb Haaland’s tenure at the Department of Interior, which was responsible for the United States government’s recently issued apology for boarding school atrocities and cultural erasure. This beautiful, brief explainer about why land acknowledgements are important is also a good choice for anyone who considers gifts an opportunity to passively educate their anti-woke relatives.
For Intellectual Overthinkers
Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber
The protagonist of Mark Haber’s novel Lesser Ruins (Coffee House Press) is a widow, a retired (or maybe fired) academic, a disorganized essayist, a bad dad, and an absolute coffee fuh-reak. All he wants is a distraction-free zone in which he can finally combobulate a million scraps of ideas and working titles into a book-length essay that he has convinced himself will launch him out of his menial middle-class mediocrity. But when he finally sits down to enjoy an uninterrupted couple of hours to write, he’s tortured by his own spiraling regrets, intrusive thoughts, and dangerous caffeine dependency. Bleak but hilarious, Lesser Ruins is for anyone yearning for an escape from constant contemporary distractions, for lovers of philosophy who want to revisit their affinity for Montaigne and Rimbaud, and for readers who like to rawdog their prose without paragraph breaks.
For the Minor Key Christmas Carol Lovers
The Moons by Chan Poling, illustrated by Lucy Michell
Lucy, the main character in The Moons (Minnesota Historical Society Press), moves from an apartment in an urban paradisiacal neighborhood populated with Sesame Street-esque neighbors to a small house on the edge of a cornfield with no would-be friends in sight. Vibrant illustrations include views of Lucy’s new rural environment from unexpected angles, like an aerial perspective of the house in the vast country expanse, and a nighttime dollhouse cutaway of the home’s interior. Soon enough, Lucy befriends a quintet of celestial satellites: Papa Moon, Mother Moon, Brother Moon, Blue, and “tippy Uncle Gibbous.” Lucy and Blue bond over their mutual, melancholy affection for minor key tunes. This sweet picture book is an obvious gift for any child going through a transition like moving to a new home, or transferring to a new school, or for any parent looking to show off their indie rock cred by displaying a book by two Minnesota musicians, New Standards and Suburbs member Chan Poling, and St. Paul warbler Lucy Michell. The Moons is also a simple, soothing story for anyone feeling bad about standing by as the liberal vision for America bleeds out.
For the Snow Chasers and Climate Change Despondents
So Cold! by John Coy, illustrated by Chris Park
So Cold! (Minnesota Historical Society Press) by Minneapolis-based author John Coy provides a cute guide for how to dress for and enjoy subzero temperatures. When his day begins with an oatmeal breakfast and -23° outdoor air temperature, the little narrator of this story says goodbye to his mother, who leaves for work in a long puffy coat, and sets out for a fun polar vortex adventure with his stay-at-home dad. Together, they watch a helium balloon shrink, blow bubbles that freeze instantly, turn boiling water into snow, and make maple syrup candy. Illustrations by Minnesota-based artist Chris Park accent the frigid fun with midcentury-style starbursts that could be snowflakes, ice crystals, or just a nod to the climate-stable past.
For Emotional Readers
Telephone of the Tree by Alison McGhee
Happily ever after? GTFO, Disney. I like my bedtime books to pair well with a box of tissues. One of my earliest, most satisfying memories of being an independent reader is blubbering sobs at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows, and I want to pass along my love of tragic literature to my children. Books are a safe space to feel my feelings by proxy and Alison McGhee’s Telephone of the Tree (Rocky Pond Books) fits exactly what my unwieldy emotionscape needs right now. Ayla, the 10-year-old narrator, misses her best friend, Kiri, and wallows deep in the Kubler-Ross denial stage when she encounters a landline in her favorite climbing tree. The phone gives Ayla a channel through which to process the tragedy that befell Kiri. This highly readable book is targeted at a middle-grade audience (that’s kids ages 8-12), but it also works for anyone who wants to be absorbed by an anti-saccharine sad story and process their generalized grief through fiction.
For Demoralized Feminists
Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal that Shook Norwegian America by Bodil Stenseth, edited by Kari Lie Dorer, translated by Kari Lie Dorer and Torild Homstad
While not technically authored by a Minnesotan, Muus vs. Muus (Minnesota Historical Society Press) was edited by Kari Lie Dorer, a St. Olaf College professor and Minneapolitan. And, technically, an academic historical text isn’t a traditional gift choice. However, there’s a lot to enjoy and learn from in this book, which is about a domestic financial lawsuit filed in 1879, involving a small inheritance and pedantic matters of Norwegian marital laws. At the heart of the story is a mean pastor who denied financial independence to his long-suffering wife, and how she used the law and the press to stand up for herself. Muus vs. Muus is an esoteric choice for everyone who sported a “We Won’t Go Back” T-shirt, yard sign, or sticker in 2024.
