Start holiday shopping, use these suggested items

With the holidays quickly approaching, busy students tend to put off gift shopping to study. This dreaded task piles up, leaving students scrambling to come up with thoughtful gifts for their friends and family.

For those waiting until the last minute to do any holiday shopping, here are some quick and easy options that procrastinating students can put together as soon as their last final is over.

By Rebecca Burns

Tearing through wrapping paper to find a nicely knit scarf with all of your favorite colors, a scrapbook filled with memories or a fabric-covered notebook acknowledging someone’s love for journaling are all ways to make a gift significantly more sentimental.

I believe in giving gifts that have meaning and last forever — or at least for a while. Homemade gifts may seem frugal to some, but I think that receiving a homemade gift from a friend represents a lot. Although homemade gifts are not always less expensive, they can be a better option for those of us living on a stringent budget.

We can find ways to use the resources we have on a strict budget while showing the gift receiver that we put sincere thought and work into the gift. The best feeling that comes with opening a present is recognizing that someone listened and remembered what you wanted.

Gift giving should not be a competition of who bought the most expensive gift. Instead, it is about finding something that will show the ones you love what they mean to you.

By Brett Murphy

What most people want as a gift for the holidays (or their birthdays, or just in general, really) is money. It’s the transnational language. But for some ungodly reason, the mere exchange of cash as a present has been labeled taboo among close friends and immediate family. So unless you’re celebrating your bar mitzvah, don’t expect to get a pile of money.

College kids, probably more than most demographics, know all-too-well this inherent desire, this unflinching attachment to the dollar bill. So for the holidays — I come from a Christmas and Hanukkah family (jealous?) — I always get people the next best thing: gift cards.

It’s quick and easy. Five minutes in a convenience store, where they have those rotating racks of gift cards for all different stores, and you can knock out the stocking stuffers for pretty much everyone you know. I usually don’t cheap out and like to give an equal $20 to all the lucky recipients. Starbucks, Panera, Dunkin’ Donuts, Amazon, Five Guys, Supercuts, IGA, Dave and Buster’s — you can give them the entire shopping gamut.

You’re giving them money but without the materialistic stigma.

By Sam Bojarski

What is the hardest concert ticket to get almost every year on New Year’s Eve? A Phish ticket for their traditional year-end show at Madison Square Garden. This is the one show every year that Phish phans dream of going to. Every Phish boy or girl, big or small, dreams of hearing Trey Anastasio’s Languedoc guitar scream the notes of Auld Lang Syne at midnight first-hand.

Unfortunately, the show is known for selling out in minutes on Ticketmaster, which results in many angry phans. This is why I think a New Year’s Eve Phish ticket would be my favorite gift to give — provided, of course, that I ever get ahold of one.

Whether the recipient of my gift had been to every show of the summer tour that year or had spent their summer nights on Livephish.com refreshing the page every ten minutes to see what songs the band was playing, the look of joy on their face would be priceless. I would realize, however, that this look of joy would by no means capture the person’s internal ecstasy that comes after realizing you are going to the biggest Phish show of the year.

Is there a special long-haired friend or Phish sweetheart in your life? A West Coast wookie who you met at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and who has to drive thousands of miles to the nearest show? If so, a New Year’s Eve Phish ticket would be the perfect holiday gift to give.

By Emma Kilcup

The holidays are a time of embracing the cliche — whether through tacky holiday sweaters or grand acts of love. So, I will say with full awareness of being cliche: The best gift is music.

Nowadays, when music most often comes in intangible form, the easiest way to gift it is with an iTunes gift card. But, what ever happened to CDs? I remember the days when you unwrapped a perfectly square, perfectly flat package and all on one disc was a collection of songs, not just one or two. By the end of the season, you could name your favorite track — because you had heard all of them as they were meant to be heard, in the order presented.

Even for the trickiest of people, music can be personal. If your dad likes Neil Young, ta-da. If you and your younger sister used to listen to Now 7 but it is now lost and scratched under a pile of disregarded items, perfect gift of nostalgia.

For a truly personal, thought-out, inexpensive gift: a mix CD. Sometimes I find in my piles of CDs past, a mixed CD whose songs were so perfectly selected and ordered. There’s something invaluable about that underrated art form.

As students developing budgeting skills, the holidays can present a challenge. I have learned thorugh previous attempts at creative gifts that clay mugs and pastel drawings are not my forte — or always well-received. I’m going to hope — for me and my reader — that music is the answer.

By Jeff Ihaza

Being one of the few human beings left who prefers to write by hand than to type, this holiday season I’d like to avoid the fancy Steve Jobs gadgets and give something that harkens back to our ancestral roots of writing things down ever so primitively.

Moleskine notebooks have the allure of making you look cool while you take notes, and in the event that the world does end this winter, whoever gets this from me will have a communication advantage over everyone else stuck trying to charge their iPads with no electricity.

By Hannah Webb

Every year, when the holiday music begins to be played at all hours of the day, I start to get stressed about what gifts to buy for my friends and family. It can be hard to find the perfect present for everyone, especially as a broke college student.

But I’ve found that with just a little creativity and thought, it isn’t too difficult to find gifts for everyone on your list. My personal favorite gift to give during the Christmas season is a homemade gift card. They are redeemable for things like a lunch date, tickets to a movie, etc.

This is especially appropriate for your significant other, if you aren’t sure what is appropriate to buy for him or her at this point. You can also never go wrong with jewelry — for both guys and girls. Watches, earrings, rings — everyone loves some new bling.

By Hope McLaughlin

While I don’t know for sure, I feel pretty confident asserting that most people don’t choose to come to Pitt because of Pittsburgh’s weather. I hear “perfect combination of city and campus,” “strong academics and Division I sports” and “the Cathedral reminded me of Hogwarts” thrown around regularly, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that they chose Pitt because they “just love constant rain and humidity.”

But alas, here we all are, pursuing higher education in the Seattle of the East. It rains here — a lot. We must make do. Fortunately, there’s an affordable, practical item on the market with the ability to keep us dry even on the rainiest of Pittsburgh afternoons. For fellow Pittsburgh-dwellers or your loved ones anywhere who don’t necessarily adore precipitation, the bubble umbrella is a perfect gift.

I may be biased because I have thick, curly hair that explodes upon exposure to the smallest amount of humidity, but I find the bubble umbrella to be nothing short of revolutionary. These umbrellas, for sale at Target for $17 or $20 depending on your color preference, provide much more rain protection than the typical flimsy nylon canopy.

They don’t turn inside-out in the wind, either. The bubble umbrella’s impermeable plastic shell, which resembles a clear, miniature version of Pittsburgh’s former Civic Arena, provides a precipitation-free sanctuary for its owner’s head, hair, and shoulders.

Its circumference is such that its owners’ torsos and lower bodies also stay dry. Every time I braved the rain with my bubble umbrella, friends and acquaintances that I encountered on campus remarked that I looked warm and dry.