Now clearly the arrival of the Goop Christmas gift guide makes all right-thinking people reach for their hair shirt while wailing about the cost of living crisis and general global strife. However, my thoughts are generally wrong, not right, so I greet it with a whoop of pleasure.
Where do you start with something this preposterous? In the less than $100 section, because $100 is obviously the smallest denomination Gwyneth Paltrow can imagine? Can I interest you in a $55 bauble? No? How about if I call it a “handblown Italian glass ornament inspired by modernist architecture”? See? Now you’re gagging for it. I genuinely love this stuff. Did no one at the bauble meeting say, “Er, but it’s just a bauble?” Apparently not, but when you’re buying yours at £3 for 24 in Sainsbury’s, be sure to ask if they were inspired by modernist architecture. Also, who gives a bauble as a Christmas present?
Teabags, though, that’s another matter, and luckily Gwynnie has that base covered too, with a $75 packet of teabags. Don’t believe me? Look it up. The fact that it’s nine varietals from the Jeju Island estates of a Korean tea producer doesn’t alter the fact that it’s a packet of teabags. “Happy Christmas! I bought you teabags.” Interesting conversation. A panettone is more festive than teabags, to be sure, and if you pay $65 for a panettone baked by Sicilian nonnas under the light of the full moon — and I paraphrase only slightly — the lucky recipient is sure to be thrilled into forgetting that panettone is pointless pap best lobbed straight in the bin.
Other Goop gift options for people you don’t like include mouth tape, a packet of straws, a small garden tool and — my personal favourite — a packet of wrapping paper, because nothing says happy Christmas like giving someone the wrapping paper but not the present. Try that on your partner and be sure to video their reaction and send it to me.
There’s a Wellness gift guide, although as it happens I hate the word “wellness” almost as much as people who bang on about it. “Well” is a perfectly good word, one that tells me all I need to know about my health or yours. It is not improved by adding “ness” to the end and charging double. Exhibit A is a $295 “Fieldhouse Microgreen Grow System”. This does exactly the same as the damp kitchen roll you used to grow mustard and cress when you were little although, to be fair, that price does also include soil. Or how about a $2,500 home gym made of solid wood, a truly astounding and pointless feat of imagination by Tracy Anderson, Gwyneth’s personal trainer or similar (I refuse to look up exactly what her role is in Gwyneth’s wellness journey)?
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There’s a gift list whose name I don’t even understand, called the Forward-to-Your-SO gift guide. Over to you. It suggests a $695 bucket for firewood and a gift voucher for a restaurant in San Francisco. The children’s list has a $73,000 Louis Vuitton travelling baby clothes trunk and a $65 set of four white bibs, which is hilarious. I wish you joy of your $65 bibs when they’re covered in sweet potato mash, ditto the $1,166 tastefully neutral wooden mini-kitchen, 100 per cent guaranteed to be less interesting to a toddler than a primary-coloured piece of plastic tat or a wooden spoon and a bowl.
Which brings us inexorably to the pièce de résistance, the ultimate barmy money-spinning nonsense that is Goop: The Ridiculous but Awesome Gift Guide, or just ridiculous for short. Rent an island in Fiji for $39,500 a night, minimum three nights. “There’s so much to love about this eco-resort,” the blurb warbles, “but what makes it truly special are the Fijians themselves.” Bleugh, pass the sick bag. I loved the $11,000 custom-built ruby safe because I wrongly assumed it was a safe solely for keeping your rubies in, with maybe an alarm that went off if you tried to smuggle in a rogue emerald. Only a fool would pay £3.40 for a chunk of 24-month-aged parmesan from Sainsbury’s if you could pay $296 for a chunk of Gwyneth’s. Chanel rollerskates for $5,125 make me question my sanity; ditto a shipping container repurposed as a swimming pool. How about a gong and stand, which “rings with a clear, deep tone like heavy thunder”? Admit it: your gong meditation is regularly disturbed by an insufficiently thunderous tone. It happens to us all. There is no shame in admitting it, only in failing to spend $2,000 on solving it. And if your shame is too much to bear, you can always go and sit in your $1,925 Hermès dog house. Hair shirt optional.
Speaking yesterday at an event in Australia, La Gwyneth said she’d love to give up acting to concentrate on Goop, and my heart beats faster at what fresh nonsense she could dream up if only she gave it her full attention. Happy holidays, as they say inLa-La land.
