Your New Favorite Store

This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own.

I am a year round shopper. In general, when I find that perfect thing that I just know somebody on my list is going to love, I just go ahead and buy it. At any given time, I have half a dozen birthday/Christmas/Channukah/Anniversary gifts hiding in my home, waiting for the day I give them to somebody who I know is going to love them.

That said, my days of year-round shopping may be behind me. Because I've found the world's best shop for awesome things for everybody that I know.

UncommonGoods.

As you may recall, I am a big fan of giving kids activities, rather than toys.

UncommonGoods has an amazing selection of toys and activities for kids. My two favorites, without a doubt, are the Make Your Own Ukelele Kit and the Make Your Own Snowglobe Kit,

If M and I hadn't gotten the twins guitars for their birthday, we'd be getting them this kit. How cool is that? Build, decorate, and learn to play your own ukelele?! I want one of those!!!

Other great toys from UncommonGoods are their language blocks. They have alphabet blocks in Chinese, Braille, Hebrew, and Hieroglyphs.

Something the twins are getting from UncommonGoods this Channukah is the Gummy Bear Lights. These things are so much better than they even looked on the website. They're flexible silicone, and really easy to use. They produce what is pretty much exactly the right amount of light to let them curl up with a gummy bear and a book in bed, and not produce enough light to disturb the two year old sleeping on the other end of the room.



My favorite feature of this toy is that it has a timer- it automatically turns off after an hour. So when one of my favorite five year olds falls asleep reading, I don't have to sneak in and turn it off.

Of course, just having an awesome, snuggleable night light isn't enough- you've got to have something to read by it, right?

UncommonGoods has a most beautiful personally curated collection of picture books. We got a copy of Lineup for Yesterday, Ogden Nash's alphabetic ode to Baseball with some of the most wonderful illustrations I've seen in a long time.

It's a ridiculously beautiful book.

 In addition to the poem, which is a really fun way to talk baseball with the kids, every few stanzas there's a page of brief biographies of the baseball players in the poem, including the teams they played for and the years they played. It's a gorgeous piece of baseball history.

I would tell you to go check out every single item individually, but there's no point. EVERY SINGLE ITEM is carefully selected, and they're all sort of magical. If you check out the selection of gifts for women, you'll find it's so much more than the usual gendered assortment of scarves and tea towels. Although those are gorgeous too.

There's a selection of steampunk light switch plates I would LOVE to get for half of my friends.

There's a selection of the world's cleverest hot cocoa and marshmallow delivery systems.

There's a set of mix tape tumblers. MIX TAPE GLASSWARE!!!!

I mean- seriously.

The diversity of the stuff in their gifts for dudes section is pretty epic, too. And best of all, they know that these items can and SHOULD overlap. There's no sense that "Shot glasses are for men and throw cushions are for women." It's a philosophy of, "Awesome stuff is for everybody."

But the icing on this cake of fabulous is without a doubt the people running UncommonGoods. Based out of Brooklyn, NY, they are dedicated to products that don't harm animals, the environment, or people. Half of their products are hand made, and the majority are made in the USA. About a third are recycled or upcycled materials, and even that isn't the best part.

Every time somebody makes a purchase at UncommonGoods, the owners donate $1 to charity. Not just any charity, four in particular. Including the one nearest and dearest to my heart, RAINN.

Get thee hence to UncommonGoods and finish up your holiday shopping. Support small businesses instead of giving all your money to Amazon and Walmart. Get something made with love, sold with love, and then given with love.

And add UncommonGoods to your bookmarks, because when you need to buy somebody something awesome, it's the first place you should look.