Kelly Klein’s Central Park West NYC apartment.
A November box is a hedge against winter gloom, prepared during the summer, and meant to be opened when temperatures plunge and it gets dark by 4:30 p.m. You assemble it in August (September at the absolute latest), when you are least inclined to think of winter, so that by the time you open it you’ve semi-forgotten what’s inside.
In the summer I only need full ice cube trays and a wide-brimmed hat, but winter calls for reinforcements, so I approach the coming season with the singleminded focus of a general preparing for battle.
I want my home to be a hybrid of fancy hotel (I like to aim high) and cozy nest. With that in mind, here is this year’s list (clockwise from upper right):
Central heating means you have to kick up the body moisturizing or suffer the itchy, uncomfortable consequences. I also like to add a couple of drops of James Read Click & Glow Gel Drops into my body lotion for some gradually developing colour. If you are pale verging-onto-greenish in the winter like me, some faux glow on your arms and legs will help them look less ghostly when they stick out of sleeves and from under blankets.
The bath needs to be a haven of good smells when nature and all living green things shut down for the season. Fredéric Malle’s Vetiver Extraordinaire body wash ($65 US) is headily resinous, faintly smoky and very green, like you’re hiking through a fragrant jungle. Vetiver is potent, but I don’t understand why it isn’t more widely used. It’s herbal and complex and earthy and I can’t live without it.
Obsessively doom-scrolling Twitter has destroyed my attention span, so it’s short stories only for the foreseeable future. Not only is there immense comfort in rereading old favourites, but as Nabokov observed “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” (meaning you only start to get it after the second or third time around.) If you haven’t read Nora Ephron’s feminist classic Crazy Salad and Dorothy Parker short stories since you were in school (or ever), now is the time.
Phlur’s Howl candle ($86 CAN) is actually named after Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem, not the wind that will be howling outside your windows this winter. Its tobacco, smoky oud and saffron blend will stand in for that roaring fire, while the spherical, lidded, porcelain jar becomes a sculptural catch-all after it’s finished.
This oversized jar of Body Shop’s Spa of the World French Grape Seed Body Scrub ($32 CAN) is a great-smelling jolt that will remind your senses that there is a living world outside, while also handily scrubbing away all the dead skin and leaving smoothness in its wake thanks to grape seed powder which is the perfect texture and offers the right degree of exfoliation. It’s not too rough but still does the job.
I am determined to keep seeing friends somehow over the winter and Yeti’s 30 oz rambler mug ($45) in brushed aluminum will keep my coffee really hot for socially-distanced dates in the frigid outdoors. (The Yeti also comes in bright colours, but ewww.)
Naadam’s kilo throw ($325 US) is 1000 grams of cashmere (my kind of weighted blanket) to hide under with your book. This is especially useful if you don’t in fact have a fireplace like Kelly Klein in her Central Park West apartment pictured above.