What to Get Your Vegan Friends for Christmas
Vegans are the most difficult to shop for. An essential for any vegan is establishing some sort of normalcy, and trying to buy a gift for someone to fill in those gaps is even harder.
It’s difficult enough going out to eat with friends and having them chastise you for ordering only a side of fries at a steakhouse, but having to pass up on chocolate chip cookies by the fire during the holiday season could be equated to ripping someones heart out. And the last thing you want to do as a friend is contribute to that pain.
While your normal friends are spending the holidays getting DIY hot cocoa mixes from Pinterest and weird bacon flavored things, you might have no idea what to do for your animal-product free friends!
If you’re stumped, here are some relatively cheap ideas for what to get for your vegan friends.
1. Veggie Spiralizer
The reason most people give up on being vegan is that it’s hard. Eating veggies and brown rice every night is the worst, so anything to spice up your meal options goes a long way. My mom bought a veggie spiralizer when I first went vegetarian, and it was freakin awesome. It’s so easy to just eat pasta every night, and while I would happily eat it for every meal, carbs are still the enemy. Switching out veggies for whole wheat pasta a few nights out of the week will help your vegan friend balance out their diet.
2. Anything from LUSH
Honestly, if you buy anyone anything from LUSH, you’re sure to win Christmas in any context. But especially for vegans, LUSH is the perfect balance between earth-friendly and attainable. Most LUSH stores are easily accessible, making it easy to switch up your beauty routine into one that’s animal-product free! And your vegan friends will totally thank you for the artsy af bath bombs.
3. EcoTools Makeup Brushes
If you’re like me, transforming your entire lifestyle into a vegan one took a lot more than I first realized. It’s not just your diet, but literally every little fucking thing you use might have an animal product in them, like your makeup brushes might even have rabbit hair in them. But thankfully, there’s alternatives, like these brushes from EcoTools. They’re really affordable, also!
4. Just make them homemade cookies
Nothing is more thoughtful than willingly slaving away in the kitchen, if you want to take that thoughtfulness up a notch, make your vegan friends special homemade cookies! This is a great alternative to the other gifts if you are low on cash, too. There’s ten trillion easy recipes that are a simple Google search away, but my personal fave is this chocolate chip cookie recipe because of the salt and chocolate combo.
5. Silpat baking mat
My entire first year of being vegan was a experimentation period in which I baked endlessly to try and replicate some of my mom’s homemade dishes that I knew I would miss being vegan. I ruined pan after pan trying to recreate my mom’s dishes. They would only end up cemented to the baking trays and thrown away in a fit of rage. What would have saved myself a lot of trouble would be a baking mat. This one from Silpat ensures easy cleanup and rage-less baking.
6. Vegan baking mixes
The worst part of being vegan is having to give up the sweets. Most cake box mixes are not vegan, and doing anything that requires an actual recipe can be time consuming and mentally draining. To save your vegan friend’s sanity, get them these mixes from Wholesome Chow. Super easy to put together, super delicious and super cheap! They have literally everything you could imagine, and some of them are also gluten free.
7. This cookbook
There are so many stereotypes associated with being vegan, and many of them involve socks with sandals or 100 percent cotton t-shirts that wreak of organic white sage. But have you ever thought about a vegan punk? That’s exactly what Natalie Slater did with this cookbook, called “Bake and Destroy: Good Food for Bad Vegans.” This book has the perfect mix between alternatives to classic comfort foods and of the craziest combos you’ve never heard of: Grilled Mac ‘n’ Cheez Sandwich, Taco Lasagna and Chick-O Cheesecake are just a few of the insane recipes.