After months of holiday shopping—and finding millions of things I want (and millions of things you couldn’t pay me to have)—the Hearst holiday gift guides are here. And I’m pretty proud of how great they look. Gifts for everyone!

There are thousands (literally) of gifts for everyone on your list. Check them out!

Marie Claire gift guides for The Working Girl, The Men You Love, Stocking Stuffers, Charitable Gifts, The Domestic Diva, and more…

Redbook gift guides: Gifts for Best Friends, Great Gifts for Difficult People, Kid Glossary, Unforgettable Gifts, Gifts that Give Twice…

Esquire: Gifts She’ll Never Forget, Gifts That Will Get You Laid, Toys No One Else Will Get Them, Worst Gifts!…

The Daily Green: The Complete Green Outfit, Green Gadgets, Gifts Outside the Box, Safe Toys…

Good Housekeeping: Housewarming Gifts, Gifts for Teens, Stocking Stuffers…

Country Living: Go-To Gifts, One-of-a-Kind Gifts, Gifts for the Hostess, Gifts for the Farmer’s Market Foodie…

Seventeen: Gifts for Moms, Dads, Twilight Lovers and more…

Cosmopolitan: $20 Gifts That Look Way More Expensive, Gifts for People Who Have Everything…

All this talk of ghost stories and history seems to be (pardon the pun) haunting me. After thinking, just two days ago, upon the literal layers of a historic house in New Hope, this morning I read in New York Magazine about the headstone unearthed last week in Washington Square Park. It’s no secret that the lively park has had many incarnations in its long history, one of which as a “potter’s field.” Last year, the first phase of a renovation project led to the discovery of intact skeletons.

The second phase is now under way, and last week a neighborhood resident reported seeing a crew dusting off a headstone. The stone dates back to 1799 and marked the grave of James Jackson, a grocer who died at the age of 28. Now the quest is on to figure out who James Jackson was. Given that the park was a Potter’s Field, there would not have been headstones in it, but there was also a church cemetery in the park at one time, or, as this blog suggests, some rare yellow fever victims did have tombstones.

Whatever the case, I will be following it, not only because it’s a fascinating sliver of New York history, but because, yet again, it underlines my vision of the city as palimpsest (which, it turns out, is not a vision unique to me), where life and stories are layered upon one another, like the paint covering John Pickett’s landscapes in New Hope or the park covering a former resting place for the city’s poor.

I did not dress up for Halloween this year. Not surprising given my dearth of creativity when it comes to costume ideas (and general dislike of the tradition as a result). What I did celebrate, however, was my favorite part of the holiday, the focus on ghosts and hauntings. While I’m not so much obsessed with ghosts, the whole historic aspect of it I find thrilling. Last Halloween, I did a pub crawl of some of New York’s favorite haunted hot spots.

This year, I’m thinking of some of the other haunted places to visit. Every major city, it seems, has its own host of ghosts, and every place worth its salt as a travel destination has a tour to explore them. I’ve been on ghost tours in San Francisco and Edinburgh and New Orleans, to name a few. They are often cheesy but always fun, and the beauty of them lies not so much in the scary factor (for me at least) but for the glimpses of history they provide.

Most recently, I visited New Hope, one of Pennsylvania’s oldest (and arguably quirkiest) towns, where they have their cadre of spooks and spirits who add a little local color to an already colorful place. On a ghost tour of the town we learned about Joseph Pickett, a painter who only received acclaim following his 1918 death, after his wife had auctioned off much of his work. The quirky Mr. Pickett is said to have shown those who made fun of his work but painting one of his landscapes on the outside of his home. While the building has been painted over today, his ghost is said to remain. This is the sort of local color I love, and the ideal ghost story, one that unearths a bit of a place’s history in relation to its sights.

For more fun “haunts” check out Budget Travel’s list of haunted walking tours.

I love the idea of learning about cultural traditions, but even better is actually experiencing them. Today Matador Travel had a great article on five places to experience Dia de los Muertos. Two of those, it turns out, happen to be in California. In San Francisco, the festivities abound, with, among others, a special San Francisco Symphony performance on Nov 1, and a Mission District procession on Nov 2.

Meanwhile, here in New York, we’ve got our own celebrations going on. The recently re-opened El Museo del Barrio will be celebrating all day Saturday with concerts, talks, food tastings and much more. This year New York, next year Pátzcuaro.

I am not a Halloween person. I have very little creativity when it comes to thinking up clever costumes and even less artistic ability when it comes to creating them. I inherited this from my mother, who loathes Halloween and had a great way of talking me into costumes that were easy to acquire, but incredibly random. (The highlights: I was a 6-year-old Jane Fonda because I already had a leotard, tights and leg-warmers and at 10 I was an electrical engineer because my father worked at PG&E and could bring home a hard hat.)

But costume or no costume, I love the holiday, and not just for the excuse to eat candy. Halloween is rooted in ancient cultural traditions, and I find the history rather fascinating. There’s Dia de los Muertos, of course, the Day of the Dead (or rather “days”—it traditionally lasts for three), perhaps best known for the colorfully dressed figurines with skull faces, but there is much more that goes into the rituals of this fascinating celebration of the the dead, which has its roots in Aztec and Mayan traditions.

Then there’s Samhain, the Celtic celebration of the dead, based around the idea that dead souls return on this one night when the veil between the two worlds is thin. Many of the Samhain traditions gave birth to our modern American Halloween traditions. For the full story check out the History Channel’s comprehensive website, complete with fun videos of New York’s parades and costumes of the Twenties.

Courtesy of Go Penguins

Antony Gormley and his Crosby Beach statues continue to fascinate me. And now I have another reason to love them (and Liverpool): they’ve inspired another installation linked to environmental protection. Not Another Place, installed Monday, October 19 on New Brighton Beach is the avian version of Gormley’s Another Place, the eerie, ethereal and amazing installation after which Not Another Place was inspired.

But Not Another Place has
another message altogether: they are part of Liverpool’s Year of the Environment, a movement focused on helping residents of and visitors to Liverpool to be more conscious of environmental hazards, with the hope, of course, that these newly more conscious will use that consciousness toward the greater good.

The penguins on the beach are meant to inspire, kicking off new piece of the project, in which the Environment Agency partners with Go Penguins, a project in conjunction with Wild in Art that will see this holiday season in Liverpool adorned by a “Winter’s Trail” of penguins throughout the town. The penguins will be designed by artists, both professional and amateur, and there is currently a call for penguin designs, open to the public. So many levels of inspiration. See more photos here.

Can a satellite view of the world change the world? It may just be able to change the travel publishing industry. Today MediaBistro published this post about John Higham, whose recent book 360 Degrees Longitude—which chronicles his family’s year-long adventure traveling the world—includes Google Earth links to some of the places visited. A wave of the travel future? It looks that way.

Though I am definitely an old-fashioned gal when it comes to my love of underlining and curled up pages of traditional books (though terribly outdated, my very shabby and much loved copy of Let’s Go Western Europe still inhabits a place of honor on the book shelf) the traveler in me thrills at the prospect of seeing a satellite view of some wondrous place I’m visiting while I’m visiting…

Food is great. It’s also necessary. But what goes into creating a good meal can sometimes not be so good for the environment, or local industry for that matter. In that vein, my friend and co-worker, the amazing Liz Griffin, decided to tackle the task of creating a delicious meal made entirely from local ingredients. It was more of a challenge than she thought it would be (sitting across from her, I got to witness the kinks), but the outcome was fantastic. Or at least looks as though it was… (I guess I wasn’t cool enough to warrant an invite!) Read about the adventure and get tips on planning a Home State Plate of your own. I have every intention of weaseling my way into her next one…

It’s that time of year again, and I (tear) am missing it. Litquake, the world’s best literary festival and big sister to LitCrawl NYC, begins tonight. And promises to be the best one yet. it had better be. It’s celebrating its 10th birthday. I’m especially sad to be missing Sarah Vowell, the North Beach Literary Tour and, of course, the Kerouac event, but as always the entire schedule looks phenomenal. Guess I’ll be spending the week doing a little extra reading…

I’ve neglected my new obsession with Maine, partly due to a hectic schedule and partly just due to the fact that if I think about Maine I want to go back—at least while the weather is still not freezing. Anyhow, I think it’s high time to re-visit (at least in words) one of the aspects that made Maine so amazing. I had the pleasure of spending my last evening in Maine at the gorgeous Inn by the Sea, an amazing property on the coast of the sleepy town of Cape Elizabeth, just 20 minutes from Portland.

What makes Inn by the Sea amazing is not only its charming New England design and its proximity to, well, the sea, but the fact that it’s a friend to the environment in just about every aspect possible. A few years ago, the inn was taken down to the studs and experienced a multi-million dollar remodel, not to make it more luxurious (which it is) but to make it completely green from its re-purposed flooring to its
solar-paneled roof.

On top of that, guests can participate in a whole array of fun yet educational events, like classes on planting native gardens or beach cleaning festivities, all that end with guests receiving milkweed seeds, to help expand the areas in which endangered Monarch butterflies lay their eggs. And all this is just the beginning. Read more about my trip here.