Choose an Experience for the difficult to buy for
Advertiser Staff
Forty-eight hours to Christmas and you're still pondering the difficult giftees on your list: The one who has everything. The one who says she doesn't want anything. The one who only wants things you can't afford.
There's always the old standby, the homemade gift certificate. Before you shrug dismissively and mutter "cop-out," let us spin it for you: Instead of a gift certificate, we'll call it an Experience Invitation. Make it a commitment, an engagement, an appointment. And choose a gift that really is an Experience — something the recipient would pay money to do.
Create a certificate with a desktop publishing system or by hand if you're calligraphically gifted. The certificate should include an invitation for a specific date, so the gift doesn't get lost in the old "never got around to it" black hole.
If you want something to wrap, find an inexpensive "hint" gift — say, a toy sailboat if you're promising to take someone out on the water — and put it in a box, surrounded by lots of confusing packing material. Tuck the gift certificate in right down at the bottom. We're spinning this, remember?
Here are some ideas that we offer as a last-minute gift to you.
Spa day
Book the person for a spa day at whoever's house has the best bathroom. Banish everyone else and turn off the phone. In advance, gather skin, face and hair care products. "Home Spa: Recipes and Techniques to Restore and Refresh," a new book by Manina Rose Golden or "The Home Spa" by Greta Breedlove Garber can help with tips. Light an aromatherapy candle, put on some New Age-y music, wear natural fibers, center your heart chakra, polish your chi. Provide a robe or pareu, serve herbal tea and discuss the day's "menu." Depending on your skills, do a facial or massage, wash and condition their hair, give a manicure or pedicure. Afterward, fill the tub with hot water scented with salts or oils, float some flowers on top, put some cold juice, fruit and magazines nearby and let them lounge for as long as they'd like.
Royal outing
Be among the first to see "The Lion King" in the large-screen IMAX format. The film opens Christmas Day at the IMAX Waikiki theater (923-IMAX). Get a toy of one of the characters at the Disney Store (Ala Moana, 957-0050; Pearlridge, 486-6955) and present it with the invitation. Tickets: $9 for adults, $7 for youths 2-12 , $8 for seniors and military.
Private screening
You just haven't seen John Woo's "The Killer" until you've seen it on the big screen while sunk in a plush leather EZ chair, a Kirin in one hand, a plate of kalbi and mandoo in the other. It can happen if you rent out The Movie Museum, a cozy little Kaimuki theater — with its 19 recliners, 9-by-10-foot screen and hundreds of film titles to choose from — where you can screen movies like wannabe Eisners and Katzenbergs. Throw in Korean take-out from Kim Chee II across the parking lot and a cooler b.y.o.b. Asian suds and you've got a night to remember. 3566 Harding Ave., Suite 4. Evening rentals Tuesdays and Wednesdays only. $190 a night. Call 735-8771.
Personal chef
The giftee gets to invite friends or family over for a meal — Saturday lunch, Sunday brunch or a weekend dinner party. You do the work: make out invitations, design table setting and decor, plan a menu and prepare it, serve it and clean up. This would be great for one busy couple to give another, and could include babysitting, valet parking and other services if several people got involved.
This could cost some serious money, so craft it to fit what you can really afford and take into account the giftee's personal style. Maybe it's just a matter of promising to pulehu some meat and fill the cooler with beer for Daddy and his pals.
On the train
Enter your favorite out-of-shape or never-been-in-shape person in one of the dozens of running, swimming, bicycling or multi-sport races held in our community each year.
The race is the target. But the real gift will be setting up a regimen and training with your giftee to help them prepare. Just be sure there's enough time to train and that, if necessary, the giftee gets the go-ahead from their doctor.
For race information, pick up Hawai'i Race, a free publication published bi-monthly and available at most sports stores.
Read to me
The giftee gets a period of being read aloud to from the work of their choice — or several evenings, if a whole book is involved. A snack appropriate to the book's subject should be served, and the reading even can take place in an appropriate setting. For example, spend an afternoon in Kapi'olani Park reading aloud from the new history of the park, "Kapi'olani Park: A History" (by Robert R. Wyeneth and MacKinnon Simpson, Kapi'olani Park Preservation Society,$24.95), or take the new Eddie Aikau biography, "Eddie Would Go" (by Stuart Coleman, MindRaising Press, $24.95), out to Waimea Beach.
Wine tasting
Check out Indigo Eurasian Cuisine's nearly year-old Tuesday night Wrath of Grapes Wine Club. Different experts host and choose wines each week, selecting a menu of seven to nine wines along with lots of interesting vino history and trivia.
The club is populated by a handful of raucous — but friendly — regulars, many of them hilariously honest (at times, even brutal) with their wine criticisms. The 25 seats usually fill up fast. 1121 Nu'uanu Ave. 6 p.m., Tuesdays. $20. Call 521-2900.
Play tourist
Make like a visitor. Create an invite and name the show and place, letting the recipient decide when. Best bets: The Society of Seven Las Vegas at the Outrigger Waikiki's Main Showroom (922-6408); Frank DeLima at the Ohana Reef Towers' Palace Showroom (923-7469); John Hirokawa's "Magic of Polynesia" at the Waikiki Beachcomber Hotel (971-4321) and the Tihati spectacular at the 'Ainahau Showroom at the Sheraton Princess Kai'ulani Hotel (931-4660).
If money is an issue, there are dozens of free music choices in Waikiki — sunset shows or bar gigs that cost only the price of a drink or two. Suit the music choice to the invitees. (See the Lounge Acts listing in our TGIF section on Fridays.)
In the swim
It's amazing how many people in Hawai'i don't know how to swim properly. Sure, most of us can bob around and manage short distances, but knowing how to swim safely and efficiently can open up a new world for your giftee.
Free or reasonably priced lessons are available through the Parks and Recreation Department, YMCA, Red Cross, or master's swimming programs.
Progressive dining
Why should prom-goers have all the fun? Do dinner and a limo (Yellow Pages, pp. 524-526).
Plan for pupu, a main course and dessert at different spots and base the choice on your guest's preferences and comfort level. Auntie might like House Without a Key at the Halekulani (923-2311), followed by The Willows buffet (952-9200) and frozen custard at Eddie's Burgers & Frozen Custard (739-0033). The foodie in your life might like pupu at Chai's Island Bistro (585-0011), a main course at Bali-by-the-Sea at the Hilton Hawaiian Village (921-2254) and dessert at the 'Ilima Award-winning Café Laufer (735-7717).
Dig up your copy of our Hawai'i's Best 150 Restaurants guide and plan your campaign.
Light up a life
Immerse yourselves in Christmas merriment by experiencing Honolulu City Lights (523-2489) or trekking to a handful of hotels at night for lobby displays.
Among the joys: the gingerbread village with choo-choo train (plus regal monarchial "scenes" by Eric Eugene Chandler) at the Sheraton Moana Surfrider (922-3111); the holiday scenes at the Hale Koa Hotel (955-0555); the grand tree at the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel (739-8888). Check our Dec. 8 listing of lighted neighborhoods.
Down and dirty
What would be a better way to spend the day than chomping on cherry guavas, sniffing white ginger and listening to a drumline of clacking bamboo? Pick a trail suitable for your level of fitness and experience: you can find detailed route descriptions at www.hawaiitrails.com.
Pack essentials (water, food, mobile phone, rain jacket, map) and stay on the trail. Guided hikes are led by Sierra Club (538-6616) and Hawaiian Trail and Mountain Club (674-1459).
Club-hopping
We're not trying to slag the many slamming weekly parties in town, but monthlies tend to concentrate more resources, offering some significant bang for the buck in terms of guest DJs, musicians, sideline accouterments and excess. Holding an event monthly also tends to help stave off the inevitable cooling down of a club's "It" status with fickle Honolulu night crawlers.
Glitter & Glamour at the Wave offers a Pussycat Lounge experience taken to the nth degree with guest DJs, fashion, art and free massages. Electric Pirahna Room at the Ocean Club — with special guests like last month's Earth Circus from San Francisco — always draws a full house. Virus Afterhours Foam Party's got, uh, lots of foam. And KIPO Blus Nights rock.
Prices and dates vary.
Tour guide for a day
If there's a place or subject you're passionate about — a historic site, a park, a hike or museum — escort your giftee there and appoint yourself docent for a day. Give a tour complete with facts, figures, stories and quotes from books you've read. Follow this with a picnic or a meal at a nearby restaurant.
Advertiser staff writers Wanda A. Adams, Wayne Harada, Derek Paiva and Michael Tsai contributed to this report.
