FIPS HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE DAY 6: HIPPIES

Every day this week, Amanda, FIPS writer and creator the douchey gift blog You're Welcome will be providing you with gift suggestions that you can buy right here in Park Slope.  Today's edition is for the hemp-wearing, pot-smoking hippie in your life.

So you've got a hippie friend.  She stocks her fridge with soy milk and tofu, leaves socialist propaganda out on her coffee table, and lectures anyone who eats meat about the atrocities committed by the cattle industry. Of course, when she's drunk, all of this goes out the window and she orders a gigantic cheeseburger with bacon from the diner and then cries all day when she wakes up and realizes what she's done.  The best day of her life was the day they went to that Phish concert back before the band broke up and then got back together again.  Pick up these gifts and your tree hugger friend will spread the "good vibes" to you forever.

1. Sappo Hill Oatmeal Soap ($1.99, Back to the Land, 142 7th Ave, between Garfield Pl and Carroll St, 718-768-5654): Even though she was reared on steady regimen of toxic chemicals and harsh pharmaceuticals, this hippie came upon an awakening, likely around college, when she was smoking a lot of pot and listening to a lot of Dave Matthews.  Now, she uses only organic beauty products.  You've told her repeatedly that that organic deorderant absolutely does not work at all and that she smells like a homeless person most of the time, but she doesn't care.  Her self-righteous beliefs trump her body odor.  Pick up a couple of Sappo Hill soaps (Back to the Land has several varieties—and, surprisingly enough, a large organic cosmetics section)—they're perfect stocking stuffers, or, if you're really cheap, they can be the whole gift.   

2. [SPONSORED] Green Housecleaning (Services starting at $99, GreenHouse Eco-Cleaning): Not all hippies are content with dirty feet and traces of the wilderness all over their homes.  But just because this hippie wants a clean home doesn't mean that she's ready to scrub everything down with harsh cleaning chemicals.  Do her a favor and introduce her to a new way to get her apartment clean: GreenHouse Eco-Cleaning, a maid service—named by New York Magazine as the "Best Eco-Friendly Cleaning Service" in New York City—that will clean her home from top to bottom without using cleaning supplies that contain formaldehyde or ammonia.  FIPS Holiday Deal: Mention FIPS when you book and you'll pay only $89 for a three-hour cleaning (that's $31 off the standard price). Visit GreenHouseEcoCleaning.com or call 718-303-7029 for more information. 

3. Garden in a Bag ($9.95, A Sterling Place, 352 7th Ave at 10th St, 718-499-4800): "I just need to be outside," she'll say to you whenever she's stressed.  Being one with nature is very important to hippies—they love laying in the grass and standing knee-deep in frigid streams, totally indifferent to all of the different bugs and diseases that lurk around every corner.  Being able to spend time outside is difficult for most New Yorkers, when your only "outdoor space" is the fire escape you share with the old lady hoarder who lives in the apartment next door.  This Garden in a Bag will allow your hippie to get some greenery in her apartment and make her feel like she didn't sell out to the concrete jungle. 

4. Found, Free, and Flea ($32.50, A Sterling Place, 352 7th Ave at 10th St, 718-499-4800): If you're good friends with a hippie, you have inevitably wasted an entire Saturday at a flea market, pawing through someone's old trash like a rabid raccoon.  As Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons said of flea markets and swap meets: "The only thing you can't buy here is dignity."  That said, going to flea markets is a way of life for a lot of hippies—they just love dragging home bed bug-ridden furniture and dressing like grandmothers.  Pick up a copy of Found, Free, and Flea, a real-life account of some lady that loves to pay good money for someone's used trash.

5. Skeem Decorative Candle ($24, Goldy & Mac, 396 7th Ave between 12th and 13th Sts, 718-832-4868): Go to a party at a hippie's apartment.  The minute you walk into the building, you're bowled over by the scent of 500 burning sticks of incense.  You'd suggest that she tone it down, but she's too busy doing a sage burning to get rid of the negative spirits lingering in the building.  Get her one of these Skeem Decorative Candles and try to ween her off the incense.  They come in a variety of exotic scents and it's way safer to leave the candle burning than an incense stick when she inevitably passes out while listening to a 27-minute-long jam track by Phish.       

6. Medical Marijuana Tin ($18, Bob & Judi’s Coolectibles, 217 5th Ave between President and Union Sts, 718-638-5770): Hippies who want to legalize marijuana always have the same argument: "how can the government outlaw something that is found in nature?"  Oh yeah?  Last time I checked, all that weed didn't magically sprout up in that little experimental farm you have in your bedroom closet.  Regardless, stoners have been finding a way around the law for years and the scheme of "medicial marijuana" is the most ridiculous one yet.  Great job, hippies, you've done it again.  Now if you could only remember where you put your keys.

For way more gift suggestions paired with jerky commentary, check out You're Welcome.  And while you're at it, follow Amanda on Twitter @AmandaWaas.