$20 ( $18 for museum members) at Academy Museum Store Once freed from the confines of the stocking Christmas morning, I know right where this one’s going to go on our tree - right next to the pink flamingo. His ornamental likeness has been added to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ gift-shop offerings (along with T-shirts, tote bags and a handful of cockroach-print items such as lunch bags and laptop sleeves) in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” a career-spanning retrospective of the Baltimore-born filmmaker’s career. This year they’re going to be joined by writer, director and all-around provocateur John Waters (“Hairspray,” “Cry-Baby,” “Serial Mom”), rendered in hand-painted glass, complete with a pink puffy jacket, a red tie and a pencil-thin mustache. Among the bold-faced names dangling in ornament form from our boughs are Anna Wintour, Frida Kahlo, Karl Lagerfeld and Snoop Dogg. One of the holiday traditions in our home is to add at least one new celebrity ornament to the tree each season. Plan ahead - and consider shopping for more than one at a time - because these ship from France, and the shipping will cost you as much as the brooch itself unless your order is 120 euros ($130.80 at current exchange rates) or more, in which case it ships for free. This year I’ve got my eye on a couple of gift-worthy brooches that seem to effortlessly marry SoCal style to French elegance, including a cute little mini cactus (pictured), a prickly pear (with tiny pink blossoms), a movie camera and a date palm tree. Today my collection of offbeat, hand-embroidered pins has grown to include a wheel of Camembert cheese, a pineapple and a cocktail with a cherry in it. This brand of whimsically embroidered accessories (the kind of brooches, hair clips and iron-on patches that might pop up in a Wes Anderson movie) from French designers Marie Macon and Anne-Laure Lesquoy has been in heavy gifting rotation in my house ever since the Bride came back from Paris Fashion Week and presented me with a lapel pin in the shape of a lit match. This is definitely the kind of stocking stuffer that will get heavy use, so why not get an extra and make your own charging life easier too? When open, an assortment of hinged USB connectors allows for two types of power input on one side (USB-A, the wide rectangular plug that’s common to computers, pronged wall chargers and many cars, and USB-C, the flattened oval style used by many Android devices and Apple’s iPhone 15) and three kinds of output on the other (via USB-C and a genius combo tip designed to somehow fit both Apple’s Lightning port and a micro-USB port). The aramid-fiber-wrapped braided copper cord loops through a key chain, and two powerful magnets hold the sides of the charger together when not in use. That’s because this designed-in-Switzerland, 3-inch-long device feels more like a Swiss Army knife of chargers than a travel charging cord. But after testing this one over the course of a four-day jaunt around the Southwest, I was sold. And also because I’m laughably lousy at cord management - as in making sure I have the right cords and plugs on hand to charge what needs charging on the go. I’m going to confess something: I bought one of these tiny devices after an ad popped up in my Facebook feed because it seemed to be too good to be true. Some of the funniest terms can’t be repeated here, but let’s just say the vulgar tongue of the 18th century had a particular fascination with procreation and the body parts involved therein that puts the eggplant emoji to shame. An abridged version of a dictionary first published by Francis Grose (described in the introduction as an “artist, militia captain and antiquarian ” in 1785 and culled from the London taverns, docks and alleys he frequented, it includes terms both familiar (“bones” for dice, “togs” for clothes) and novel (an “addle pate” is what you’d call an inconsiderate or foolish fellow “ruffles” are a slang reference to handcuffs and “to shoot the cat” is to vomit from an excess of liquor). This humorous compendium of 237-year-old colorful slang, curse words and insults was stuffed into my stocking last holiday season, and I have yet to crack it open and not find something that makes me laugh heartily.
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