Last year, we did things differently for Christmas. A jaunty new challenge was introduced: made, re-gifted, or thrifted (the Americanism makes me itch, but it rhymed better than ‘second-hand’). Trawls around charity and junk shops and eBay, industrious little endeavours at home, these replaced the usual endless online scroll and PayPal notifications, the mad dash around Oxford Street, hot and bothered. I gathered vessels and gravel, forced paperwhites in the cupboard under the stairs. M mixed cocktails and I tied labels around bottles. We fashioned babysitting vouchers and saved seeds from favourite flowers.

When Christmas Day came around we unwrapped a bundle of surprises. A paperback copy of How to Survive Christmas by Jilly Cooper, a pie dish with naval iconography, an elaborate board game in which one had to pretend to be a medieval villain stealing the crown jewels. My mum had embroidered vintage napkins; mine had a tree in each corner, going through the seasons. M’s, brilliantly, had the Spurs crest and the Covid-19 virus (he had spent the previous 18 months as a kind of amateur epidemiologist). Both came inside antique silver napkin rings with our initials on, with the instructions never to save them for best.

It’s a cliché that the home-made gifts are the best, but the older I get the more I realise it’s true. The home-made, the homespun, the bargain Facebook marketplace finds and the “saw this, thought of you” spontaneous purchases. The delivery of good fresh pasta on the day you move into a new home; the tracked-down vintage crockery you admired somewhere else, months before; the fresh flowers spotted at the market; the pot of jam boiled up on your birthday, and tasting like you would if you were a fruit to be in-season. These are things to be savoured.

Which is why I’m offering up a small, sustainable package to allow you to give a year’s subscription to savour to someone this Christmas. Each week, they will receive savour and savourites, my Friday dispatch filled with links and recommendations for recipes, reads and tasty morsels, as well as free access to members-only events.

Substack already have a characteristically straightforward way of gifting a subscription (head to savour.substack.com/gift, and select “schedule for later” if you’d like it to land in someone’s inbox on Christmas Day) but I know it’s nice to unwrap something. So, I’ve printed photos from moments I’ve savoured this year into FSC certified, recyclable postcards, along with a special savour card. If you’re buying a savour subscription as a gift, drop me an email with proof of purchase and the best address, and I’ll send you a postcard package and a handwritten note to give to the recipient for no extra charge - all tied up in a bow. After all, ribbon makes everything better.