The PopCulteer
October 31, 2025

We have a short column this week as yours truly is already hard at work on The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide, which will begin Monday in this blog to aide you with your holiday gift giving duties, with all recommendations having our usual pop culture slant.

Following the format we established last year, this year’s Gift Guide will have two entries every weekday, with the plan seeing them online by Noon, Eastern time. At least one item per day will be a single item, with a retail price of less than fifty bucks.

There will also be entries that include multiple items, and some of our suggestions will exceed that fifty dollar level.

Because of the quirks of this year’s calendar, the final day will fall on Black Friday, and will include the last two entries, and…with some luck…the Master List of everything I recommend.

As I mentioned last week, our tradition of opening the Gift Guide with The HESS Toy Truck will be broken this year. I just couldn’t bring myself to recommend what I feel is a very disappointing and overpriced entry in the long history of the HESS Toy Trucks.

I feel I have found a suitable and affordable alternative, which you will see on Monday.

The reaction to this year’s HESS Toy has been largely negative, and I don’t know if that spurred an open letter from John B. Hess announcing that the Hess family, which sold HESS Oil to Chevron earlier this year, will retain the HESS Toy Truck business, and has big plans for the future, with a special collectible planned for next year, but the timing was curious.

I’m hopeful that this indicates that this year’s disappointment was simply a rare miscue, and that next year will see a triumphant return to The PopCult Gift Guide for the HESS Toy Truck.

This year’s Gift Guide will be comprised of toys, physical media (LPs, CDs, DVD/Blu Rays, real books and other things you can hold in your hands), local, regional and online retailers, plus some electronics, clothing items, decor and various and sundry knick-knackery.

Thanksgiving will be “Turkey Gift Day,” once again, because really, who reads this blog on Thanksgiving Day?

I will try to shy away from recommending limited editions of anything. I want people to be able to find the gift ideas I suggest.

I’ve actually done some form of Gift Guide every year since I started this blog in 2005, so this is the 21st time I’ve come up with a list of gift suggestions for my readers. It really took off about fifteen years ago, and for the last few years I’ve been winding it up in November for two reasons: First, it gives people time to order gifts that can’t be purchased locally; Second, it allows your humble blogger to be done with this massive undertaking in time to make our yearly visit to Chicago for my lovely wife’s birthday.

We will be going again this year. No amount of dictatorial showmanship is going to stop us from going to a place where we feel safer than we do in Downtown Charleston.

Another quirk of the calendar this year sees me posting the preview for The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide on Halloween. I have not foresaken that holiday. We’re just observing it over on our sister internet radio station today. Beginning at 7 AM Friday (that’s today) you can find Halloween editions of our music and comedy specialty programs, plus a coffinload of special presentations on The AIR.   The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

That is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day, plus all our regular features and, starting Monday, The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide.