I’ve decided to forgo Christmas this year. With my home remodel stalled in a Kafka-like legal snag, many good friends out of town, several family members in jail and a boyfriend who’s a former, no-holiday-celebrating Jehovah’s Witness, it felt futile to try and fire up my festive fires.

The upside of Scrooging? I’d save money on gifting.

Hardly. Several days in the city to run errands last week and I was shopping like a meth-fueled Ivana Trump.

But shopping for myself.

Here then is my list of highly recommended items to give yourself for Christmas this year. Because to love yourself is — indeed — the greatest love of all.

Kiehl’s Powerful-Strength Line-Reducing Concentrate

Another Christmas. Another year older. How sad that is. Kiehl’s mad scientists deserve a Nobel prize for concocting this Vitamin C-loaded, face cream. I tried this stuff on a madcap whim and was inspired by how quickly it worked. As soon as I dabbed it on my face a warm heat began radiating its jujuified magic.

I’m not saying I looked like Brad Pitt after one application. But, several slatherings later I was at least looking as good as the cuter Quaid brother. It’s rare to find a face product that doesn’t smell like something from Aunt Martha’s Avon arsenal (Kiehl’s products never use scents of any kind) and this really does a super job of giving your face a rejuvenating kick. Avoid this at your own sagging peril.

A ticket to see Daniel Craig in Casino Royale

I gave up on the Bond franchise years ago. Whatever hunky sex appeal Sean Connery radiated back in Goldfinger felt faded and cliched throughout the subsequent films of the Ian Fleming series. But then someone got really smart (and really gay) and tapped the scruffy, husky Daniel Craig for the 007 role.

Even if Casino Royale had been a bust (which it wasn’t — I’d put it near the top of my list for great films in 2006) you’d still need to pay your ten bucks for the ceremonial spectacle of watching Craig’s impossibly perfect body arise, glistening, from the turquoise blue Bahamian ocean in Royale. That shot (above) turned Craig’s fleshy cinematic moment into the homo equivalent of Elizabeth Taylor’s legendary skintight white bathing suit revelation in Suddenly Last Summer. Wow! Queer iconography in the making. Don’t miss it.

Sufjan Stevens Songs For Christmas

Retailers have destroyed the fun and spiritual beauty of Christmas music. Who in the fuck wants to hear Do You Hear What I Hear two days after Halloween?

Troubadour Sufjan Stevens (right) found a way to bring new life to old yuletide dreck and composed Songs For Christmas to reacquaint himself with the original spirit of holiday music. I’ve been a fan of this cutey ever since his album Seven Swans mixed up banjos and Salvation Army-style arrangements with songs about love and Armageddon.

“It’s a sacred form,” Sufjan says of the Christmas songs album, “and yet it’s also incredibly annoying and profane because it’s the soundtrack in shopping malls across the country. I’m interested in reconciling this phenomenal event — the incarnation of God — with Santa Claus and blue-light specials at Kmart and the weird preoccupation we have with buying a lot of junk…”

All of Stevens’ trademark sounds are in place: banjos, oboes, wood flutes, buzzy guitars, hand claps, a Hammond organ and lots of sleigh bell.

Songs For Christmas is so fresh, sparse and free of pretense it will make the air around your stereo glow like baby Jesus’ face on Christmas morn.

Butt Book: Best Of The First 5 Years Of Butt Magazine

Best of BUTT: Bringing back the “sex” in homosexuality

Since its first legendary issue in 2001, international quarterly magazine BUTT has been bringing together groups of young alternative gay guys all around the world, connecting fashion, sex, and art with a good sense of irony.

Put together by the magazine’s founding editors Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers in collaboration with photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, this book is a ‘best of’ compilation of the first 17 issues of BUTT, full of interviews with famous personalities and photographs by the likes of Terry Richardson and Inez van Lamsweerde, as well as sundry unknown talents.

Collectors of the magazine who have been desperately searching for rare back issues will be able to round out their collections with this compendium, which will also be a delight for those who haven’t yet discovered the joy of BUTT.

(Ho-Ho) Votivo Candles

The fact that Madonna hoards these and won’t go on a soundstage without them didn’t influence me. Nor did Oprah’s penchant. She describes every scent in the Votivo line as “gorgeous” (though please note when gifting Ms. Thang that Rain is her favorite).

I love Votivo because, once lit, their aroma is persistent but subtle. Too, their scent is derived from organic ingredients — not synthetic concoctions from Monsanto’s laboratories on Mars. My friend Edgar, charmed by the votive candles he’d discovered on a trip to Mexico, started this company with friends several years ago and sales have been out of control ever since.

These are the first scented candles I’d allow in my house — and that’s radical. I can’t even read magazines because perfumed ad strips make me violent. Votivos come in just about every olfactory experience imaginable (though they’ve discontinued the Poppers line). Each candle is boxed with Old World charm and burns for 50 hours (just like Edgar.) They’re available at Saks, most Nordstrom and sundry other high-class establishments. Start sparkin’, stud!

Morning Glory Chai

This is only available in Seattle and San Francisco — but if you live on the West Coast it’s worth your while to track this elixir down and stock up for the winter.

Having decided to cut back on caffeine this year I switched to chai. But soon I was disappointed with what the local baristas were serving up (too cloying and medicinal). But then I discovered this “invigorating Gypsy drink” (that’s what the Morning Glory people call it) and was soon carting home jug after jug. This isn’t the kind of chai you’d associate with hippie housewives. Hardly, this crazy conncoction could almost be illegal. It’s that good.

What’s in it: Black tea, ginger, black pepper, cinnamon, orange peel, astragalus, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, cloves, vanilla bean and a little maple syrup. How do you feel after drinking it? Ready for love, baby … Cheers!

My Favorite CDs for 2006

Obviously I didn’t re-purchase these for myself — but I thought I should list my favorite discs of the year because it’s hard to find really good music nowadays. So here goes, my top five albums of 2006:

1. Sparklehorse Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain It’s fitting that the year’s most overlooked album was also the year’s best. Linkous makes the kind of spooky pop charmers that perfectly capture the arduous process of creating art — moving from empty static to the sublime with ease.

2. Califone Roots and Crowns A fun-house of found-sounds, noise passages, and brilliantly obscured folk and blues music. This album is what an impressionistic painting of autumn would sound like.

3. Hot Chip The Warning God forbid (sorry Tara), I liked this better than the new Thom Yorke which couldn’t compete with the happy warmth Hot Chip managed to assemble within their buzzin’ and grooving electronic kitchen.

4. The Decemberists The Crane Wife Teasing influences touch just about every song — from Talking Heads, Beautiful South, Jethro Tull and even 70s arena gods Yes. The Decemberists songs are sinewy and literate — in a Charles Dickens sort of way. There’s even a ballad about butchering children that somehow brings a smile to your face.

5. Juana Molina Son Ambient folks finest moment in 2006. Molina’s harmonies, sung entirely in Spanish float atop sound loops, glimmering guitar, nearly imperceptible electronic noodling, and subtle layers of vocal overdubs and pitter-pat percussion — simply spellbinding!

Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation

I remember when I was a kid, late at night, furtively turning on the small TV I had in my bedroom to catch Gore Vidal whenever he made an appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. My favorite exchange was when Vidal made a case for waterless toilets — thinking humankind insane for shitting in the very water they drank. That was Gore, prescient and controversial.

When I was 18 and encountered Vidal’s notion that “homosexual” was a verb and not a noun, I knew I’d never live my life as a pigeon-holed queer. I’m sad to think that Vidal is the last emblem of a genuine iconoclast that gay men have. I mean, who could possibly replace him? As Camille Paglia noted: “We need someone like Vidal present in the country all the time. He is a true gay role model, a man of culture and learning and style who represents the best of a worldliness that is conspicuously lacking today. With his courtly manner, Vidal is a patrician throwback. I love his acerbic, waspish style. His fearlessness. The bold attacks.”

Point to Point, the last of his memoirs, is a scattershot, stream-of-consciousness compendium. Gossipy bits abound, but it’s his tender but stark retelling of his lover Howard’s death that stuck me the hardest.

Campus Ladies

Well, this wasn’t a shopping find — but the much anticipated arrival of season two of the funniest show on television. I laughed, I cried — it became part of my life.

Oprah’s Favorite Things

Forget Baby J’s B-day — it’s all about Oprah’s big 5-0 people — as this classic SNL skit proves.

Merry Christmas y’all!