From hand-drawn coupons to a handful of tickets to a local show, shared experiences can beat most presents that fit in a box. For this year’s roundup of holiday gift-giving inspiration, the Town Crier staff searched Los Altos for a gift, a book and an experience fit for every age range. In each instance, we found a local source, story or angle that can add extra meaning to your connection.
For babies and children
• Gift: If you’re buying for an extremely small addition to your social circle, the Oball Rattle ($7.99) strikes a balance between simplicity and baby-pleasing sound effects. It is often sighted at local playgroups. The brightly colored geometric balls are easy for tiny hands to grab and lightweight enough for a small baby to gleefully bash around once those fingers do get a grip. You can find them at Los Altos’ Adventure Toys & Teachers’ Supplies, 173 Main St.
If you’re skewing just slightly older but still in the diaper-wearing age, Adventure Toys’ Izzy & Owie leggings ($15) feature ample sizing in the seat and a sassy color scheme, with a mermaid face on the booty of one striped pair, a dinosaur on another.
For more information, visit adventuretoyslosaltos.com.
• Book: Linden Tree Books at 265 State St. in Los Altos stocks an entire wall of board books for your youngest readers, but some of its new acquisitions for those who no longer chew their books are of special note this holiday season. “The Horribly Hungry Gingerbread Boy: A San Francisco Story” (Heyday, $17) by Elisa Kleven features a patchwork riot of color across its very local pages. A piece of pastry chomps his way through San Francisco neighborhood by neighborhood in this celebration of place. Another book focused on the city, Dave Eggers’ “This Bridge Will Not Be Gray” (McSweeney’s, $19.95), uses sparse collage cutouts to tell the true story of a local landmark.
For more information, visit lindentreebooks.com.
• Experience: Los Altos Hills’ nonprofit educational farm, Hidden Villa, caters to young explorers year-round with classes to suit special interests. Book a place for the youngest nature-lovers in the Forest Playgroup ($15) to search for rocks, bugs, birds and scat. More independent 7- to 11-year-olds can work the farm without adult intervention in the kids-only Future Farmers class ($25), which shadows Hidden Villa’s farmers as they care for cows, sheep, goats, chickens and pigs. Check the calendar for constantly added new classes, ranging from cheese making to crafting beauty products from honey and other local ingredients.
For more information, visit hiddenvilla.org.
For teenagers
If you’re adrift coming up with an appropriate gift for a teen, consider taking a cue from the students at Los Altos High School, who’ve self-organized into a service organization raising funds for a school in Haiti.
• Gift: Donate in your teen’s honor to the Lambi Fund of Haiti and have a conversation about it. Lambi is building water cisterns for families in Haiti to ease the burden of water collection. In the drought- and cholera-plagued northwest region of Haiti, where women and girls bear the brunt of hours-long water-gathering trips, communities are finding new ways to build water infrastructure with Lambi’s help.
For more information, visit globalgiving.org/projects/give-water-give-life-to-haiti.
• Book: A local author recently published a book aimed at readers either young or young at heart – regular Town Crier contributor Megan Kempston’s book “The Forest Spell” (available on Amazon, $15) is set in a place suspiciously similar to the Santa Cruz Mountains that rise above Los Altos. This fun, fast read takes you into the woods a world away from your own high school experience. Teenager Zie is figuring out who she is and how she fits in, faced with classrooms divided by magical ability, not race, class or money. Meanwhile, her teachers remind us that the grown-ups haven’t figured it all out yet, either.
For more information, visit Amazon.
• Experience: The skateboarding lessons at Los Altos’ Skateworks, which include rental of a board and safety gear, aren’t just meant for little ones. Instructor Andrew Langi competed in the X Games before coming to town, and can offer – quite literally – pro tips for the already experienced.
Private lessons can range from introduction to the board to advanced workshopping, at $50 per hour for up to two participants, or $80 per hour for a group lesson with friends or siblings. Grind at Skateworks, which has a ramp, or the location of your choice. Skateworks is located at 379 State St.
For more information, visit skateworks.com.
For adults
If you’re gift shopping for grown-ups or the almost entirely grown, we don’t have to diverge from this schema – there are local books, treats and experiences for the adults in your life, too, even if they swear they want nothing this year.
• Gift: To avoid adding more belongings but still show a festive spirit, you can turn to a tidy bundle of almonds, roasted and salted in the shell, from Present at 162 Main St. in Los Altos.
“You twist and crack them and then you eat them,” Present’s co-owner Jim Reynolds summed up succinctly as he pulverized one of the nuts and popped it in his mouth.
Reynolds said the almonds are a top seller for hostess gifts as well as general-purpose treats. The mound of savory nuts from Nunes Farms in the Central Valley makes for an interactive snack that’s gentler on the hands than a peanut – and no seasonal nutcrackers required here – but still includes a nod to the nut’s orchard source. The almonds come in a muslin bag or rustic basket for $12.95.
For more information, visit presentlosaltos.com.
• Book: Los Altos Hills resident Mary Feliz has been making her mark in the “cozy mystery” subgenre – also known as “cozies” – novels that approach crime fiction with less lasciviousness and gore, and more small-town humor. For better or worse, she picked our own small town for mayhem in her debut novel, “Address to Die For,” which came out in paperback last summer (Lyrical Underground, $15). Feliz’s protagonist, professional organizer Maggie McDonald, moves with her family to an inherited 100-year-old house in the hills above Silicon Valley and discovers a mess, in more ways than one.
For more information, visit Books Inc. at 301 Castro St. in Mountain View, Barnes & Noble or amazon.com.
• Experience: If you want to encourage a bashful artist in your life, Los Altos potter Hila Itzhak’s studio at 981 Fremont Ave. welcomes grown-ups to its ceramics classes, which focus on small-group learning at the pottery wheel. In addition to weekend workshops and classes on hand-building, sculpturing and wheel-throwing, Itzhak teaches joint parent-and-child classes.
“You don’t need talent – you learn technique,” Itzhak told the Town Crier earlier this year when she opened her studio.
Her classes cost from $140 to $280 for four sessions.
For more information, call 471-2120 or visit facebook.com/halopottery. ❄
