Texas Monthly‘s annual list of the year’s top 25 Texas gifts is out now, in time to help you choose the best—and most Texan—presents for your loved ones this holiday season.
This week on TM Out Loud, the team behind the list is in the studio to share a few of their favorite picks and the stories behind them. Then they’ll take a festive—and surprising—journey into the Texas Monthly archives to revisit two of the magazine’s first holiday gift guides, from 1976 and 1979.
This piece was produced by Sara Kinney, Patrick Michels, and Brian Standefer.
Transcript
Katy Vine (voice-over): Hi and welcome to TM Out Loud, exclusive audio storytelling for Texas Monthly Audio subscribers. I’m Katy Vine.
If you love someone who loves Texas, then around this time of year, you may be on the lookout for something both Texas-y and tasteful that they can cook, decorate with, or wear around town. Something that’ll remind them of you and of their favorite place on earth.
In that case, Texas Monthly has got you covered—this year, as in years past—with the Texas Monthly gift guide, a selection of local favorites that range from stocking stuffers to once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
This week on TM Out Loud, the team behind this year’s gift guide—executive editor Kathy Blackwell and Texas Monthly contributor Paul Underwood—are here in the studio to talk about their picks, plus a few surprising finds from the ghosts of gift guides past.
Here’s Kathy Blackwell and Paul Underwood.
Kathy Blackwell: Hi, I’m Kathy Blackwell. I’m an executive editor at Texas Monthly, and I am here with Paul Underwood, one of our contributors to the magazine. Hi, Paul.
Paul Underwood: Hi, Kathy. How are you?
Kathy Blackwell: Good; how are you?
Paul Underwood: I’m great.
Kathy Blackwell: So I have been at Texas Monthly since 2017, and the very first project that I worked on was the gift guide. And that year, we put it on the cover. And it was kind of a deep dive into just the world of Texas makers. Texas Monthly has always been such a resource to find these interviews with makers from across the state who do all kinds of things, from what you expect when you think of Texas, such as cowboy boots and hats, to just really sophisticated artwork, and, of course, fashion.
For the last few years, we’ve really been focusing on what we call the top 25 Texas gifts. And I think what I like about this kind of curation is that it really tells a story about Texas, especially at this moment—what people are making, what people are buying, what the trends are, that kind of thing.
And my hope is that it inspires our readers to look for these gifts, but also other Texas-made or Texas-adjacent gifts. It’s really important to support these artisans. And sometimes, of course, the price can be a little steep, but you’re paying for a one-of-a-kind and, in many cases, just really unique gifts.
So with that in mind, for this year, I turned to Paul Underwood, who’s been writing for the magazine for what now—two years, is that right?
Paul Underwood: Something like that, yeah. I haven’t been keeping track. A while.
Kathy Blackwell: And just a little bit of background about Paul is that I meet writers from all over the state, and it’s just a really great position for me to be in. And occasionally I meet a writer who, just, I really click with, and who really understands the magazine, just kind of right off the bat.
So Paul, let’s—I’d like to talk to you a little bit about why you were so interested in writing about these makers, and kind of your background in this whole world, and putting together gift guides in particular.
Paul Underwood: Let’s see. I’ve worked in what I will reluctantly call the men’s lifestyle space for more than twenty years, including stints at T: The New York Times Style Magazine; at a long-lost, sadly, website for Condé Nast called men.style.com, which was ultimately doomed by having to say “dot” twice in the name. But over the years, that’s included putting together gift guides. And I think, you know, the challenge and the pleasure of gift guides is not just coming up with sort of an editorially interesting product, but finding something that’s actually useful and aspirational.
And I feel like I repeat the same line sometimes when I’m writing, but that line is: It’s something that the person you’re giving the gift to would use and get for themselves and use it every day, but a little bit nicer, a little bit better. So, trying to find those items—and, I mean, there’s just such a wealth of talent and innovation in the state. And this is, I think, a celebration of that.
Kathy Blackwell: That’s great. And your first gift guide for us was this past summer, for Father’s Day. Right?
Paul Underwood: Father’s Day. Yep. Yeah, we had some good items in that. You know, one of the things that’s kind of funny right now in the culture is that Western style’s very in, and Western style’s never out in Texas. So it’s like this nice overlap of on trend and timeless that I think we kind of get a little bit of in the holiday gift guide too.
One other thing that I really enjoy about the gift guide, and what I hope is the joy for somebody reading it, is that they get to pass the story along to the person they’re giving the gift to. I mean, it’s really nice when you give somebody something and it’s not just, “Here’s the thing I got during Black Friday sale at such and such retailer.” It’s like, “Oh, this shirt was made by this woman in this part of Texas, and she named her store for her mom. And her mom grew up on a farm, and then she grew up on a different farm. And there’s sort of a farm aesthetic to it. And, you know, it reminds me of you because of whatever reason.”
You know, I’ll admit, I am a professional storyteller, so that appeals to me in and of itself. But I hope that the gift guide isn’t just stuff—that it’s also passing stories along from one Texan to another.
Kathy Blackwell: Yeah, I love that. And of course, a bonus to doing the gift guide yourself is that it’s kind of like insider trading, where you’re also doing your own Christmas shopping. So I definitely give gifts from my research, and when I think about what you just said about the story behind the gift and what it means to the person receiving it—last year, I wrote about these cosmetic bags that are made by a nonprofit. They use the leather from old Southwest Airlines seats. And they have women who are recovering from domestic-abuse situations and things like that, and they make these bags using that leather that Southwest gave them. And I loved giving that cosmetic bag to several of my friends. It just made it a little bit more meaningful than just a cosmetics bag.
Paul Underwood: Yeah, that’s amazing. I’ll admit that— especially when I was doing the Father’s Day guide, it’s like, “Oh, these are things I want to give to a very special recipient, who is me.” With working on this too, it’s like, “Oh, here’s some stuff to go on my own wish list.” Yeah.
Kathy Blackwell: I love that.
Paul Underwood: When I’m putting together a gift guide for Texas Monthly, I mean, it’s like any other article—you are thinking at least a little bit about the sort of end reader and who you imagine it being. I mean, you think of the Texas Monthly reader—it’s somebody who’s in Texas, or nostalgic for Texas and living elsewhere. It’s somebody who’s obviously talented and amazing and beautiful. You know, we gotta butter up our readers. It’s somebody who’s curious and intelligent. And, you know, I kind of hate the line that gift guides use sometimes, but it is somebody who kind of wants to “win” at gifting. They want to give the best, most interesting, unexpected but useful but awesome present. In some ways, that’s the same as other gift guides I’ve worked on. You do sort of imagine the “power giver,” so to speak. But to me, the Texas Monthly power giver is, like I said, a little bit more attuned to the state. It’s somebody who just feels connected to all those things we love about the place—the land and the sky and the people. And they want to build on that connection at a pretty special time of the year.
Kathy Blackwell: So, Paul, I have my favorites in this gift guide. But I’d like to hear maybe about two or three items that you found that you were really pleasantly surprised by, or that you were particularly excited to include in the gift guide.
Paul Underwood: Oh my gosh. Well, it’s hard to narrow it down. One of the things that excited me was, I’ve been following Bexar Goods, out of San Antonio, for a long time. And they recently entered an agreement with the San Antonio Spurs, which is cool. It’s cool to see a big NBA team partnering with a small local business to create something new. And one of the first things to have come out of this new partnership was these hoodies, that are just—like, when I saw them, I just thought of, honestly, I thought of my own son, who is eight. But I was like, flash forward six years, and this is the kind of thing he would put on and not take off until it’s March.
Kathy Blackwell: And I have to tell you just to, just to add on to that, with hoodies—when I was looking through this, I thought, “We have to have a hoodie,” because that is the one guaranteed gift that my son loves every single year. So you can’t go wrong with a good hoodie.
Paul Underwood: Yeah. I don’t know what it is. The hoodie’s become like the uniform of kids, and maybe it always has been, but I’m just really noticing it right now.
Kathy Blackwell: Yeah, for sure.
Paul Underwood: And then I’ll say that something I would love to get, and yet I would never want anybody in my life to actually go through the hassle and spending the money to do it—like, I want it to just magically appear in my life. And that’s tickets to the World Cup next year.
Kathy Blackwell: Absolutely.
Paul Underwood: I mean, it’s a—I’ll say it’s a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because we last had the World Cup in America in ’94?
Kathy Blackwell: ’94. It was in Dallas. It wasn’t in Houston. And this year the World Cup is in both of those cities.
Paul Underwood: Yeah. So it’s this holiday or, you know, whatever, 2055. So get it now or get it then.
Kathy Blackwell: It’s gonna be interesting to see how that all unfolds. But I was living in another host city in ’94 and saw the effects of it, and I went to my first and only World Cup game, and it was incredibly exciting. So we don’t do a lot of experiences in the gift guide, but we typically do a few. I think last year we suggested tickets to the LPGA tournament in Fort Worth. And I feel like those are great.
You know, I had my favorites too in this gift guide. I’m looking particularly at the copitas from Marcello Andres in Dallas. His copitas are those beautiful little cups, and they come in all kinds of colors and glazes. And I thought, you can buy several and then give one along with a little bottle of mezcal or tequila as a host gift, which would be really nice. Or maybe two.
Paul Underwood: Yeah, little cups like that are like Swiss Army Knives for your kitchen life, you know, even having, like, frozen french fries from your favorite big-box grocery store. You know, you put a little, like, homemade sauce in there, and you feel like you’re at a fancy, you know, five-star restaurant.
Kathy Blackwell. Absolutely. One thing that I was really touched by were the makers with strong ties to Kerrville. And, of course, there were the devastating floods this past summer. And James Avery, which is the longtime jeweler based in Kerrville, they obviously did a lot because they’re known for their camp charms and all of that. And we did a story on James Avery and their memorial charm for Camp Mystic and so forth. And so I was really happy to see that we had the collaboration between James Avery and another lovely, wonderful Texas-based business, Consuela. And Consuela is interesting because they’ve been around for twenty years, making these really colorful bags, beautiful bags that my friends and I have all used over the years. But they went viral with the younger TikTok generation a couple of years ago, and they’ve become incredibly popular.
Paul Underwood: Yeah. I mean, the collaboration is an opportunity to do something very rare in the gift-giving world, which is give somebody a gift where when they open the wrapping paper and the box has the names on it, they will be twice as excited as they would normally be by either of those names individually.
Kathy Blackwell: I love that. And then the other Kerrville-based maker is Clint Orms. It turns out that Clint did the belt buckle for our December cover on “Best Things in Texas.” We have a beautiful silver, huge belt buckle on our cover, and Clint designed that, and I had no idea that he was the designer until we were well underway with the issue and you had already turned in your copy. So I thought that was just really interesting.
Paul Underwood: Yes. We don’t normally do this, but you could do just a blanket endorsement of anything from him will be a hit with whoever you’re giving it to. And as you’re saying, it’s a great story too. I mean, it feels right for this year. It feels right for any year, but it feels especially right for this year. It might sound pretentious to say, but this is a gift guide that’s not about stuff—it’s about the people who make those things.
Kathy Blackwell: It’s the best gift guide ever written.
Paul Underwood: And that’s why.
Kathy Blackwell: So one of my favorite things to do with the magazine is to go back into our archives and look at old issues. And I don’t just mean online. I love getting the actual print copies and looking at the old advertisements from the seventies and eighties and because they really capture a time. So, ahead of this conversation, Paul, our audio and video fellow, Sara, did some research, and she found some of our really old, like, original gift guides from the seventies. And the first one ran in our November ’76 issue, and it’s phenomenal. It’s called “A Texas Christmas,” and it’s kind of scary, honestly. My first instinct when I look at the opening spread is one of a little bit of terror because I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s a gift, a wrapped gift in the desert.
And then the first gift that they show—sorry, I’m trying not to laugh. It’s—for about $3,000, you can get a genuine Texas-horn armchair and footstool. It looks like a torture device. But that was their number one gift. And then it gets even more terrifying, because then you see a doll with a tea set. It just looks like something from a horror show. No offense to anyone who worked on this. You know, Texas Monthly‘s been around since 1973. We marked our fiftieth anniversary a couple of years ago, and it’s just been so fun to use that as an excuse—that anniversary—to kind of go back into what we used to do.
But one thing that really stopped me about this gift guide, Paul, was one of the gifts—I’m gonna read what it says: “No self-respecting Texan should be slicing chili peppers on anything else. This patriotic cutting board is made of sanitary, heat-resistant, stain-resistant plexiglass. $8.” And it’s a photo of the plexiglass cutting board in the shape of Texas.
And so I laughed when I saw this, because the very first gift guide that I worked on—that I mentioned the December issue from 2017—we have a Texas-shaped cutting board on the cover. It’s made of wood, and so it’s a little different in that regard. But that’s just how we love our Texas-shaped cutting boards. You find them everywhere. You find them at H-E-B, you find them at the farmers market. I’m kind of thinking maybe we should go back in and add a Texas-shaped cutting board. Just make it our thing. Like every year we just do one.
Paul Underwood: No self-respecting Texan would not be caught cutting on anything else, is the way I understand it.
Kathy Blackwell: Exactly.
Paul Underwood: I want to say something about the art that went with this, is that this came out a year before Star Wars, but it looks like—I’m not a Star Wars expert, but it looks like, you know, the sandy place and planets there. It doesn’t look Texan to me at all.
Kathy Blackwell: Yeah, that first image is Tatooine, right, where Luke is from? That’s what it looks like. It’s like, instead of Luke Skywalker, you see a silver gift on the landscape.
Paul Underwood: And it’s especially jarring when you go down to number twenty on their list, which is two stuffed monkey dolls, one of which is wearing a Superman cape for reasons unknown. It’s just so bizarre. I also wanna point out that there is a revolver on here, which is pretty interesting.
Kathy Blackwell: And not just any revolver, Paul.
Paul Underwood: Right.
Kathy Blackwell: It’s like, what, $2,500, and it’s from the Civil War.
Paul Underwood: Yep. Probably wouldn’t run that one today.
Kathy Blackwell: It really adds a whole—I mean, it’s like, this is a good idea for someone.
Paul Underwood: Should we segue into the ’79 guide? Because that also seems a little . . .
Kathy Blackwell: Well, let’s do it, because that’s a really interesting time period. Yeah. Tell me what your thoughts are here with the 1979 guide. It’s called “Grand Indulgences.”
Paul Underwood: Yeah, and the first item is a time capsule. It’s a Concorde to Paris from DFW, which goes for the low, low price of $2,718. And that’s 1979 dollars. That’s, you know, oil-crisis dollars. I don’t even know what that would be in today’s money, but it doesn’t matter, ’cause the Concorde doesn’t fly anywhere anymore. And then you go down to number three, and there’s, what—I’m not sure what’s happening in the artwork here, other than that it’s a human being with what seems to be a bow painted onto their back and sitting in the bathtub.
Kathy Blackwell: Well, she’s painted with Zoo Goo bubble bath paints. The ideal Christmas gift.
I do love, “Take a sunrise stroll along the picturesque San Antonio River.” Like, how is that a gift? And if someone offered that to me as a gift, I would kick them into the San Antonio River. So what I love about things like this is they do serve as time capsules. And I’m assuming at some point, fifty years from now, somebody will be taking our gift guide apart. And our art choices, so, fair. But I love the fact that, like you said, that it did start with the Concorde.
Paul Underwood: There’s something that, like, as a sort of cultural anthropologist, I’m curious about some of these things. Just seeing linens and china and crystal in here, I was like, do pe—did people really give that as a holiday gift back then?
Kathy Blackwell: Some of the things I do want. I’d love a crystal drinking spoon. The bed warmer is a velour hot water bottle. And that sounds incredible.
Paul Underwood: Yeah.
Kathy Blackwell: I would like one of those. Paul, thank you so much again for joining me in this conversation about your 25 top Texas gifts for 2025. Ooh.
Paul Underwood: Yeah. My pleasure. Twenty-five in ’25.
Kathy Blackwell: Twenty-five in ’25. And I’m already thinking about what we’re gonna do next year. You give me some good ideas.
Katy Vine (voice-over): That was Kathy Blackwell and Paul Underwood. You can check out this year’s Texas Monthly gift guide at texasmonthly.com. . . . We’ll be back with more from the pages of Texas Monthly next week.