Holiday Gift Guide: All Things World Cup
By Lizzy Young
One of the biggest sporting events in the world, the Qatar 2022 World Cup, is happening this holiday season! Since sports is on the mind, we have compiled a two-part gift guide pertaining to the World Cup. The first part is a list of sporty Red Hen titles and merchandise to give to the World Cup fan in your life. The second half seeks to remember the death of migrant workers in the construction of the world cup stadiums. To expand the conversation this holiday season for the social justice-conscious person in your life, we have compiled a list of our titles that discuss immigration as well as gifts you can buy from businesses that donate to refugees, immigrants, and migrant workers.
First up, is the sporty titles in Red Hen’s catalog!
A collection of headlong tales by Oregon author Brian Doyle–exploring such riveting and peculiar topics as chess in the Levant, tailors who specialize in holes, how to report stigmata to your attending physician, the intense hilarity of basketball, how to have a bitter verbal marital fight in your car, an all-Chinese football team in Australia, soccer and Catholicism, what it’s like to be in a ska band, a singing Korean baker, an archbishop who loses his faith between the salad and the entrée, genius Girl Scouts who save a radio station, and a baby born from a lake in Illinois. And some other fascinating stories. Really. Trust us.
Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country
Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn’t just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond’s effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices — from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin — to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people. The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody; the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry; our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It’s the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the hell happened to our country.
In the nearly twenty years that Leonard Koznowski has been sheriff of Beaver Rapids, Wisconsin, he’s never encountered a homicide. When the local mortician and his assistant are brutally gunned down, Leonard is thrust into a tumultuous investigation linking religion, high school athletics, the black market of body parts, unwholesome sexual proclivities, and a sinister secret society. And with deer season fast approaching, the timing could’ve been a hell of a lot better.
Inspired by actual events, acclaimed cult author Jim Knipfel gives a hilariously dark, satirical twist to the American pastoral.
Next up, is gifts for the World Cup fan!
Looking for a stocking stuffer for a World Cup fan? Look no further than a replica of the 2022 World Cup game ball. Bonus, it’s handmade!
Team USA Soccer Logo Sweatshirt
Do you have a passionate soccer fan in the family? Get them this cozy sweatshirt to cheer on Team USA in their quest to win their first-ever world cup. Support another team? Choose another team’s logo from this seller to help the World Cup fan in your life show their team spirit. Bonus, this sweatshirt is sold by a woman-owned business!
No world cup gift guide would be complete without a replica soccer ball. Buy this for the soccer player in your life!
The second part of this gift guide reminds us that the holiday season can also be a chance to slow down and reflect on important issues like the migrant workers who died constructing world cup stadiums. The following books reflect on immigration to help produce thought-provoking conversations around holiday tables for the social justice warrior in your life.
Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives
Chopper! Chopper! reflects the lives of Mexican Americans, immigrants, and la jotería–malfloras, jotos, and other rainbow communities–across many generations. As vividly as Mexican Technicolor, these poems capture life in the barrio: vendors hauling carts with elote, raspados, botes y más. Vatos fighting to exist. Summer evenings, children playing in the calles of East L.A., El Paso, Toronto, of bordered tierras everywhere. Reyes’s work exudes the pride, strength, turmoil and struggle of neighborhoods brimming with tradition and invention. These homegrown verses reveal the barrio in all its intricate layers. Reveling in difference, they fight to make room for something new: marimacha poetry
Two-Countries: US Daughters & Sons of Immigrant Parents
The newest addition to Red Hen’s Anthology Series, Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents is an anthology of flash memoir, personal essays and poetry edited by the adult child of an immigrant born and raised in the US. The collection contains contributions from seventy writers who were either born and/or raised in the US by one or more immigrant parent. Their work describes the many contradictions, discoveries and life lessons one experiences when one is neither seen as fully American nor fully foreign. Contributors include Richard Blanco, Tina Chang, Joseph Lagaspi, Li-Young Lee, Timothy Liu, Naomi Shihab Nye, Oliver de la Paz, Ira Sukrungruang, Ocean Vuong and many other talented writers from throughout the US.
*Winner of the 2021 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry Award for Outstanding Book*
*GOLD MEDALIST in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award — One Author — English*
In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present. These poems interweave an early childhood lived in another country and in another language with experiences of immigration and family histories in the United States. They create connections between a child’s naïve perspective of dictatorship and an adult perspective informed by bodily illness and political knowledge. Ultimately, Caballero traces a lineage of memory, exploring how present moments unearth the past that ripples through them. This collection does not reconcile the past and the present. Instead, these poems remind us that how we ask questions about ourselves, our histories, and our bodies is what creates our identities, our traumas, and our future hopes and possibilities.
Keep reading to find gifts that help support immigrants and refugees.
This cozy hoodie reminds us that we are all human. It is made by a company founded by children of refugees who give a portion of all proceeds to refugee organizations.
These tote bags are made in America by a company that employs immigrants and donates 10% of profits back to organizations that help immigrants. They are also perfect to take to the grocery store!
This tassel key chain is made by refugee women in Dallas. Support them with this handy stocking stuffer!
This spice blend is made by farm workers in California and supports them. It’s a great stocking stuffer idea!
Following this gift guide, you now have a gift idea for any type of World Cup fan in your life! Happy Holiday shopping!
