Style Forum Special from Music Guy on Vimeo.

Have a spare 45 minutes? Well worth watching this extremely interesting Tom Ford documentary!

Are you at work? We’re totally at work, even though it’s a federal holiday. But it’s 2012, and we’ve heard that everything is expected to be magical from here on out.

Anyway, while we are all hopefully still on break (whether figuratively or slightly more literally), we wanted to make a suggestion. Chances are high you have already heard of this service, but if not, it is the best money we spend each month: Spotify’s Premium service. It’s $9.99 a month, which is the high-class option that allows for offline playing of playlists. This means that you can basically listen to anything, anywhere, forever [or as long as you pay them $9.99 a month.] We hesitate to mention it, because we figure you’ve already heard about it. But hey! Maybe you had heard about it but didn’t know there was a free trial going on?

Also, we made up a little Bunnyshop playlist for 2012. Click on the link, and it’ll take you to Spotify, where you can register. There’s some good music there!

We thought it might be interesting to take a look at awesome examples of gift wrapping today. Of course, most of our presents will be presented in, perhaps, brown paper bags, or perhaps just as is, a condition we describe as “au naturel.” (Because we’re lazy.)

We will say, though, that washi tape is the absolute best and most all-purpose wrapping agent ever. (See above.) And cheap: This set is $30, but individual rolls can be as little as a couple dollars. Washi tape set, $30

We especially like washi tape for books because it is easy as fuck. Here is our own usage:

There are several more million books about it at Kinokuniya, but if you’re stuck with Amazon, here’s our pick:

Japanese Washi Paper Crafts, $12.62

We also like this ridiculously great table (and some other washi projects) from Apartment Therapy.

We’re slowly getting over our Christmas shopping grumpiness—the closer to, the less Scrooge/Grinch-like we feel about the entire deal, even though we’d still like to go to the post office without committing the better half of the afternoon to it.

This weekend, we were in San Francisco for the Renegade Craft Fair, and as usual, we saw a load of great stuff that would make awesome gifts. These are our favorites.

Actually, we didn’t even see this at the show. But we wish we had, because we totally would have bought it. Brass chevron triangle, $46

We really love her necklaces most but can’t find them online, so will make do with these lovely laser-cut designs. Molly M Designs print (medium size), $40

Also, we think this is a really good iPhone case for a dude, or a little brother, or similar. Or a girl! Whatevs, obvs. We actually had our stand next to the lovely Wooly Bison, and can reveal that she sold loads and loads of stuff. iPhone military-canvas case, $22

There are nine million iPad cases for sale, but we happen to like the people who make this one the best. Rickshaw Bagworks case, $30

We’ve been whining so much about holiday shopping that we thought we’d put up the funniest thing we’ve ever seen. These are Seven Minutes in Heaven with Mike O’Brien, an SNL writer, and they are amazing.

We forgot how much we hate shopping at this time of year. We love shopping. And we love (pretty much) the holidays. The two together: nein! No! Never! It’s all of what we like least about shopping (crowds, lines, high prices), plus cold weather. Please forgive us if we’re posting a little less than usual—we just object to money being shaken out of our pockets by the holiday-industrial complex. On the flip side, we’re so excited for the spring collections we can hardly stand it. When we were in high school, we worked at the Gap—actually Gap Kids—and every year, we’d get Holiday I and Holiday II—basically, lots of black, super brights, sequin—Christmas party colors. And then in January, once the sales were done, we’d get the most beautiful transitional collection in for January—all nautical stripes, whites, and soft colors. We’re psyched to go home and for Christmas and presents and all that—but man we look forward to going back to shopping with a bit of mental space in the mix.

Until then, we’ll be featuring bits and pieces here and there that we’re into—like this coin purse by Tracy Tanner, $39. We need this because every night we come home and take off our jeans and freak out when all the change falls out of our pockets. Also: Neat pattern and color, no?

Today got extremely busy, so we thought we might just share a couple Christmas-y song videos from Love Actually, which is how we’re spending the end of our day today.

We thought we could keep it to just the Olivia Olson All I Want For Christmas Is You, but then we were reminded of this scene (with Andrew Garfield from The Walking Dead!):

And then of course the wedding scene! It’s impossible (we think) to find embeddable, but here’s a link to it.

So! We spent the weekend at Unique LA, which was awesome. The funny thing about being a vendor at a craft show is that you actually don’t get to shop at it at all unless you have a friend with you, who doesn’t mind minding stuff while you’re not there. We didn’t this time around, so we have to make do with scouring the vendors from home. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

We spent most of the weekend across the aisle from Love Nail Tree, and if we’d known how cheap this awesome necklace was, we would have bought it. Take Aim necklace, $38

Of course we love the map necklaces from our friend at The Weekend Store. Vintage map necklace, $28

How could we not want to buy a porcelain origami rabbit? Mini bunny, $15

Vintage Remade had amazing clutches made from recycled materials—this bag is our favorite of what’s on their website. Montreal Crossbody bag, $98

So! We’re in LA this weekend for UniqueLA (come by if you’re around!) and when not scurrying around picking up last minute supplies, we’ll be touring our favorite shops—like New High Mart. We love this shop for many reasons, but none less than the fact that you can search their shop by categories like collectible, heritage, and Lithuania. We like to think of the vibe as DIY, but only if you did it yourself, like, in the country, over a period of many, many hundreds of years.

Like this sweater, above: Wool and the Gang sweater, $179

We thought these would be a little more expensive. Star gloves (from Bolivia), $32

More of these Pendleton-y bags that aren’t, and so cost a lot, lot less. Arrow satchel, $138

Our two favorite things are super expensive, so we had to put them down here, where we can sort of hide them:

We can’t believe how ridiculously crazy this limited edition wallet is, with a lining made from Meiji-period Japanese cotton. Barrett Alley wallet, $460

And then this vintage amber choker, $650

You may be thinking: Wow. There is a ridiculous amount of food to eat at the holidays. We hear you. There is usually not very much food to eat in our apartment, seeing as we spend most of our time out of it—except on Sundays, when we go to Mazzola Bakery in Carroll Gardens and bring home as many cookies as we can carry.

This is perhaps the worst-possible introduction for our post today on P90X versus Insanity.

If you’re looking for a present this holiday season that will help you get fit and deal with (a) holiday food overload or (b) cookies and Wheat Thins, we so heartily recommend P90X. We have written about it previously, and we love it. You may know this if you watch the infomercial every morning on Comedy Central while getting dressed (like we do), but P90X is a 90-day program with a weekly plan of three weight workouts, two cardio, and Yoga X, which is impossible for a lot of the jacked-up dudes who complain about it on the message boards and pretty easy if you’ve ever done yoga in the past. After doing it pretty steadily (even while more or less ignoring the eating plan, which does not include cookies), we literally had a rash of people (including two massage therapists, while working on the best story ever) saying to us earlier this year that we were “fit.” We swear to God: We thought, the first couple times, that they were making fun of us. Then we realized: P90X was working! Even if we still had our Sunday afternoon cookie runs.

We realized, though, that we tended to follow a pattern: We’d stick pretty religiously to the three weight workouts, but the two cardio ones … meh. One of them is “Plyometrics” (“jump-training”) and we found this difficult to do simply because we live in an apartment building, and the downstairs people, we felt, did not deserve an hour of us jumping on their heads. So we’d go to the gym and use the elliptical or we’d run, while watching Survivor. We weren’t making much real headway here. More often than not, we’d skip the cardio. Disaster!

That is, until we saw the ads (because we love those infomercials) for Insanity. Led by Shaun T., Insanity is made up of super-intense cardio workouts. So we did a quick Google search for hybrid P90X/Insanity workouts, and put them together. They are like PB+J. Or two other things that go even better together. They’re harder (at least for us newbies), but they’re shorter (around 45 minutes, while a P90X leg workout is closer to 1:15, from warm up to cool down.)

If you’re only going to get one, we’d say strongly: Go with P90X. (Or P90X2, which will be out in time for Christmas.) We love Tony Horton, who leads the P90X videos. You just—well, we do—absolutely believe him when he tells beginners to “press pause—we’ll be here when you get back.” We found both of these workouts super-hard in the early days, and that makes a difference. Shaun T. says the same sort of stuff, but you sort of think he’ll think you’re a pussy if you do. It seems like a small thing, but in P90X, Tony shares the set with three or four other work-outers, so you can see their form. (These include the awesome Dreya Weber.) On Insanity, a couple of the models who are featured prominently go through the workouts just totally hamming it up, like—this is the face I make when it’s really hard, this is the face I make now. It’s kind of annoying.

Insanity does have some big pros: It’s easier to travel with, because you really don’t need any additional equipment. It’s shorter. And we think we actually saw results faster with Insanity, in terms of an demonstrable improvement in our fitness level. We occasionally have caffeine-induced episodes of heart racing—we noticed these have stopped since we added Insanity to our workout schedule. It’s officially only 60 days—but hopefully it’s not like you’d get to the end and just quit, so whatevs on that one.

Still, our heart belongs to P90X, and it’s the glue that holds our fitness life together. It’s pricey, but if one of your resolutions is to get fit, we heartily recommend it. Stick with it, and it’ll work, and isn’t that all we can ask of our fitness programs?

Above: Lululemon Herringbone Define Jacket, $108. Here’s the thing: Everyone says P90X is expensive, and it is, but it’s not much more than this jacket.