The PopCulteer
November 2, 2018

Okay, I realize that you probably don’t really need instructions for a gift guide, but just so you know what to expect over the next month, I’m going to try to lay out everything as clearly as possible.

This is the fourteenth annual PopCult Gift Guide, and every year I try to suggest cool things that I think my readers would like to know about so they can give them (or receive them) as Christmas (or Hanukah, or Kwaanza, or whatever) gifts this holiday season. Every year we do things a little differently that we have before, and 2018 is no exception. Superficially, I’m not putting the words “PopCult Gift Guide” in the headline for each post. It makes the links a tad unwieldy, and any readers ought to be able to discern what they’re reader from the context and the graphics.

I’ve also added an extra graphic to our header post, to drive that point home, although it’ll disappear after December 1, so that won’t really be an issue for folks reading these as archives posts in the future. And oddly enough, some of my previous gift guide posts still attract readers more than ten years after they were originally published, all year-round.

I have made one change since the preview post I put up last week. Instead of Saturday being BIG TICKET DAY, where each gift idea costs more than a hundred bucks, now Saturday and Sunday will both be BIG TICKET DAY, where I reccomend two gifts per day, and each gift idea will cost over sixty dollars. The main reason for the change is that a lot of the things I was going to recommend have dropped in price since I first started compiling my list, and this way we can still include them all.  This means that through the week, each gift suggestion should cost you under sixty bucks.

I will try to include at least one local-to-West Virginia item every weekday. Some of these will be recommendations for Charleston-area stores or restaurants. Many items I suggest will only be available online, and I’ll include links for ordering, but in the case of things that are available locally, I will try to tip you off to where you can shop local. My readership is about 20% local and 80% everywhere else, so please don’t get upset if it seems like I’m not doing enough to promote our local businesses.

Posts should go up in the afternoon each day, and you can expect at least three gift ideas a day, and as many as five. The 2018 PopCult Gift Guide runs the entire month of November, so if you have to order something, you should have plenty of time to get it delivered.

During the gift guide, we are suspending two of our regular features, The RFC Flashback and Sunday Evening Videos. You can still expect to find Monday Morning Art and The PopCulteer on their usual days.

With those points established, and also with the guide already underway (we started with three gift ideas yesterday–you can find links to the right), let’s let things resume. Look for three more posts later today.