In a holiday bind? Here are some last-second Christmas gifts for St. Louis Cardinals fans
It happens to all of us from time to time.
Your planning is done, your packages are wrapped, you’re fully set for the holidays – and then the dawning horror sets in. You forgot to buy a gift for your cousin’s husband or your uncle’s new extremely divorced girlfriend, and they’re coming to Christmas dinner.
All you know about this virtual stranger to whom you owe a dawning gift realization is that they’re very in to the St. Louis Cardinals. Or anyway, they were a couple years ago when they were good, and in the intervening years they’ve become convinced that all which separates the team from glory is manager Yadier Molina, hitting coach Albert Pujols, pitching coach Adam Wainwright, and also it would be great if they brought back Jeff Albert, who it actually turns out is good now.
Never fear, don’t fret.
Consider the gift guide below, composed of products which are all available at MLBShop.com. This is a wonderful opportunity to show your love and appreciation for someone special to you by spending a little too much money on dead stock garbage which will arrive sometime in the middle of January with between two and five printing errors.
St. Louis Cardinals car door light – $32.99
Through a hundred years of projecting images with light onto another surface, humanity has learned the importance of proper distance and focus, as well as the necessity of a flat, clean surface for displaying the image. Ideally, the display takes place in the pitch dark, allowing your eyes to remain focused on the art displayed in front of them, which is also the ideal location for such a display.
Enter the car door light, which it appears is magnetized or perhaps glued to the inside of your vehicle’s upholstery, and is guaranteed to shine a blurry, oddly misshapen logo directly on the ground for at least a couple days before the battery runs out. The good news is that baseball guys are much less finicky about the logo being trampled than hockey guys; there are a few printed on the carpet pattern in the Cardinals clubhouse, after all. So when you step on it on the way in and out of the car, at least you’re not calling down the wrath of whatever sports gods you believe are certain to punish you.
In the best case scenario, perhaps a car thief sees the light when they crack into your vehicle and shows some mercy, either finding common cause or determining you’ve had a bad enough time already.
Nolan Arenado name and number bodysuit for newborns and infants – $25.99
You forgot your cousin had a baby, didn’t you? Like I said, these things happen. The world moves quickly, and Christmas cards only come once a year. Still, you can’t have the baby show up and not receive a present. Will the baby understand where gifts came from? No, of course not. But your aunt will, and she is watching and judging, perhaps less silently than you might prefer.
The challenge of buying baby clothes, as I understand it, is that babies grow very quickly. If you shopped ahead and bought a onesie in September, it might not fit by the time it’s unwrapped unless you bought it several sizes too large. Time passes quickly, and you need to make sure your extended infant relatives always stay current.
The Nolan Arenado baby suit is perfect, because by the time the baby outgrows it in a couple of weeks, he’ll be playing somewhere else. Under trees all across the metro area, City Connect Arenado jerseys are wrapped up and waiting, and nervous parents are gnawing their fingernails praying that the trade won’t come until after Christmas.
Never fear. You made it. No one, baseball executives included, wants to work over the holidays. Your kid will enjoy his or her jersey for at least the next five or six days, which is precisely the amount of time the onesie will stay in good shape before enduring a diaper blowout, being deemed unsalvageable, and promptly dumped in a Target trash can.
2024 Bowman Draft factory sealed hobby box – $529.99
A box of damn baseball cards is $600 after shipping and tax. For only $500, you can send your relative to my basement and they can have anything they want from the five mouldering cartons of junk wax piled under the stairs.
St. Louis Cardinals 3’ x 5’ Mandalorian deluxe single-sided flag – $47.99
I love Star Wars. That love has been blunted in recent years by the pump and dump Disney content machine, but it would be hard to argue against The Mandalorian being among the two or three best things they’ve turned out in their decade controlling the franchise. There is a Lego Star Wars advent calendar within arm’s length of my desk. I am not averse to buying disposable Star Wars garbage.
This flag befuddles me. Are the Cardinals Baby Yoda? Who’s acting as Mando? Is it you? If so, you should know that this flag can only be tacked to a wall, because it’s single sided. If you fly it outside, half the people at any given time are going to have no idea what it’s for, and the other half will be seeing the back.
LucasFilm’s imprimatur is stamped on the bottom right corner, so you know this is officially licensed merchandise. No knock offs here. This is the way.
