A few dozen snow globes lined the window sill of the den at my cousin Ida’s apartment in central Missouri. I’m not 100 percent sure how my mother Carol was kin to her, but I remember visiting the gregarious, bouffant-ed Ida several times during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then well into her 80s but seemingly ageless, she’d cook me and my sister Sally chicken and dumplings and unspool stories about the weekend road trips she and her late husband Ned had taken all around the U.S.

Ida and Ned would stop at state parks, roadside oddities, and historic sites. They’d usually pick up a snow globe at the gift shop—a heart-shaped number holding the St. Louis arch, a Kentucky souvenir dome corralling a grasshopper-sized racehorse. “We thought about collecting spoons when we traveled,” Ida told us once. “But these snow globes made us laugh!”

The globes filled me and Sally with a sense of wonder. We especially loved domes where the snow fell in incongruous places like the Arizona desert or on the beach in Puerto Rico. They seemed like little fairytale worlds, forever trapped in time.

“I think on a basic level snow globes are magical and they provide a quiet, contemplative uncomplicated place to ponder,” says Liz Ross, co-founder of CoolSnowGlobes, which sells artful contemporary glass orbs holding beachscapes, autumn trees, and city skylines. “When you turn them upside down and then watch the snow settle they reveal the scene and calm you down.”

So where did snow globes come from, and why are travelers still buying them?

Snow globes drift into Europe

The first snow globes were probably produced in Europe in the 1870s. One of the oldest surviving examples, made in 1889 to celebrate the debut of the Eiffel Tower, is on view at the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin.

The Wiener Schneekugel (Original Vienna Snow Globe Manufactory) got into the blizzard-in-a-glass-ball business in 1900. Its founder, inventor Erwin Perzy, was looking for ways to brighten then-new filament lightbulbs. He filled the round glass bulbs with things he thought might improve reflectivity—ground glass, semolina, rocks. Nothing lit up the bulbs, but when he tipped filled the globes with water and tipped them over, the flakey substances lazily fell to the bottom mimicking—aha!—snow.

Perzy inserted a tiny metal model of a church into one orb, topped it up with water, magnesium powder, and rock, and patented his schneekugel (snow orb). His descendants still craft and sell snow globes in Vienna; visit their shop-meets-museum to see historic examples and pick up souvenirs saluting Austrian landmarks (Graz Tower, St. Stephen’s Church) and legends (Sachertorte, Mozart).

A flurry of snow globes in America

When Americans like Ida and Ned started road-tripping after World War II, souvenir shops popped up along highways and tourist hotspots, hawking snow globes and other mementos. “They were kitschy and reminded people of places visited as well as trips gone by,” says Andy Zito, a collector who owns more than 11,500 snow globes, which he showcases in an online museum. “They also [could be] displayed easily together for a fun conversation area of your house or apartment.”

While early globes were made of glass, mid-century ones were often fashioned from newfangled molded plastic, making them more affordable and, sometimes, cornier. Ida had several with ladybug-sized figures balancing on weensy seesaws: a donkey and a hillbilly in front of the Missouri State Capitol, a pair of alligators teetering in a mini Louisiana bayou.

Like souvenir T-shirts or holiday tree ornaments, snow globes serve as markers of a well-traveled life, both distillations of memories and tokens signaling that you have been somewhere, even if it was just the state park down the road. Their nostalgic power was so great that Orson Welles famously used one in the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane” to symbolize lost youth and the grip of memory.

The modern art of the snow globe

Like many souvenirs, snow globes have morphed with the times, from low-cost airport shop/roadside attraction trinkets made of plastic and glitter to glamorous, collectible glass balls. Louis Vuitton and other luxury retailers now produce globes featuring shopping bags or flagship stores in never-ending winter storms.

Makers like CoolSnowGlobes are creating not only souvenirs but diminutive works of art for tabletop or bookshelf: the New York City skyline rendered in rainbow hues, a Thai-style golden Buddha which—with a flip of the wrist— becomes engulfed in gilded confetti. “There are so many technical considerations when you make a snow globe,” CoolSnowGlobes’ Ross says. “For example, normal perspective does not occur in a globe. A cube that would normally get smaller to the eye as it recedes actually gets bigger and wider, so we have to do a lot of compensating when working with certain shapes. The round glass filled with water acts as a fish-eye lens both enlarging things and distorting them.”

Ross’s globes are baseball-sized, but gift shop globes are often smaller—think the diameter of a golf ball—to comply with airplane carry-on restrictions.

Snow globes in pop culture

Pop culture still utilizes the memory-in-a-bottle nature of snow globes. In the video for Taylor Swift’s song “Lover,” a snow globe comes romantically to life. Married artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz turn their fascination with winter into limited-edition snow globes and a work called “Utopia Work Station” that invites viewers to sit in a life-sized globe. In the 2002 thriller film “Unfaithful,” Richard Gere bludgeons his wife’s lover with a fancy snow globe.

Ida would’ve been aghast at the idea of using a snow globe as a weapon. But I thought of her during the trip I just took back to San Antonio, where I grew up. At a downtown gift shop, I spotted a tiny snow globe containing a mini Alamo and an ant-sized longhorn cow. I tilted it over and back upright.

White flakes engulfed the idealized scene, and suddenly I was a Texas kid again, traipsing through the musty, stony walls of the Alamo with my family.

Oh, except that blizzard. The average annual snowfall in San Antonio is under an inch.

American state fairs—with their pie-baking contests, livestock displays, and carnival rides—are celebratory cousins of Mexican fiestas, British village bazaars, and Japanese matsuri (street festivals). Besides fried things on a stick (Spaghetti and meatballs! Beer!) and rickety-looking roller coasters, these salutes to U.S. ingenuity show off homegrown crafts, from carved butter sculptures to Navajo quilts.

The new exhibit, “State Fairs: Growing American Craft,” at the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, dives into the makers and materials of these all-American jubilees. Highlights include portraits of Dolly Parton and Barack Obama (rendered in seeds and nuts!) as well as an artful display of 700 jars of canned fruits and vegetables. Also on view: Indigenous clothing, crocheted handbags, and artful baskets far beyond anything I ever made at Girl Scout camp.

I’ll be hosting a free, docent-guided tour for subscribers November 8 at 11 a.m. followed by lunch at a nearby restaurant. Grab your spot here (space is limited to 14 people). The last Souvenirist event drew a great group and lively convos about travel, crafts, and current events. You won’t want to miss this one!

One highlight of “State Fairs” stands outside the Renwick: a 12-foot-tall pair of Lucchese boots that belong to “Big Tex,” the 55-foot-tall, animatronic mascot who has been greeting visitors to the Texas State Fair in Dallas since 1952.

I met Tex once on a family trip to the fair. I was a seven-year-old San Antonio kid in pigtails, and he scared me to death. His pick-up truck sized cowboy hat looked like it would fall and crush me, and his constant “howdy” greeting sounded creepy. But after a day on the midway—and a pretty good Frito pie—I turned into a state fair fan.

I think you will be one too, and I hope to meet you at the tour.

“Only fancy people order room service.”

That’s what my mother Carol told me and my sister Sally whenever my family bunked in nice hotels during my childhood. Her point? The Bargers aren’t the Astors, and even if we suddenly came into a truckload of money, dialing in for dinner was wasteful and extravagant.

Still, Sally and I drooled over room service menus. Some hid in leatherette binders, others bore whimsical illustrations like prancing chefs and smiling hams. We’d pore over descriptions of perfect club sandwiches, luscious milkshakes, and “man-sized” burgers and enviously watch uniformed servers wheel food carts down hotel hallways. What delicacies lurked under those silver domes? Why were we forced to eat limp cheese sandwiches and Vienna sausages from a can beside the Holiday Inn pool instead?

As an adult, you are allowed to order room service!

I didn’t lose my room service virginity until spring break of my sophomore year in college. The first night of a girls’ trip to Puerto Vallarta, after many margaritas at our beach hotel, I tipsily filled out a breakfast-in-bed card and hung it on the outside doorknob. The next morning I blearily answered a knock at the door. There was a tuxedoed waiter! He pushed a cart into the room, whipped the metal cloche off my huevos rancheros, and poured me coffee. I was mesmerized, and my hangover soon vanished.

Ever since I’ve been hooked on the treat—and retreat from the world—that room service provides. “Sometimes you just need that kind of meal to set you right and adjust you to a new place or time zone,” says Jeralyn Gerba, editorial director of online travel magazine Fathom (and fab travel Substack Way to Go). “Plus my kids are delighted about eating in their PJs.”

Here’s why—and what—I order in sometimes, and a bit about the history of burgers in bed.

A brief history of room service

People have been dining ensuite since as early as the 15th century, when taverns might send a meat pie or some soup up to your room. It was simple stuff, but by the end of the 19th century, room service emerged as a luxurious add-on at the grand hotels popping up in Europe and the U.S.

“The highest paid, best chefs in America came from Europe, and they started working in hotels,” says historian Jan Whitaker, who writes the blog Restaurant-ing Through History. “There weren’t any luxury restaurants, so a hotel was probably the best place to eat.”

Hotel chefs from France and other foodie countries plated lobster Newburg, clams casino, trout amandine and other “continental” fare in crystal chandeliered restaurants. Such high-falutin dishes started rolling into hotel guest rooms in the 1890s thanks to hotelier George Boldt, the Prussian-American proprietor of New York City’s original Waldorf-Astoria. Boldt had seen how popular room service was in Europe, so he adapted it for his luxe Midtown Manhattan hotel.

“To important guests he sent up boxes of cigars and rare wines, and many guests found champagne and baskets of fruit in their staterooms,” wrote Horace Sutton in the 1959 book, Confessions of a Grand Hotel: The Waldorf-Astoria. “A popular feature of European hotels called ‘room service’ was installed in the Waldorf, and Americans liked it so much that Boldt added an extra charge for it.”

Early 20th-century room-service menus list both familiar comfort dishes (burgers, soups) and delicacies lost in time. What in the heck is a Nesselrode Pie (from the Waldorf circa 1946) or a Lynnhaven (some sort of appetizer via Cincinnati’s Netherland Plaza Hotel in 1937)? In the 1960s, caviar delivery cost $6.25 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Other menus featured dancing, smiling liquor bottles, happy waiters or sexy female genies, like the one brandishing a rib roast on a 1970s menu for the Aladdin Hotel & Casino in Vegas.

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Thumbing through these old menus is like traveling back in time. You can buy the real thing on eBay and Etsy (search on “vintage room service menu”). Or try Vintage Menu Art for prints reproduced from old menus—a few would look cool framed and hung in a kitchen.

The relaxing magic of room service

Say all you want about lingering over breakfast at a Paris café or venturing into the smelly delights of a Colombian fish market. The ultimate way to travel slowly and mindfully could be ending or beginning the day with room service at least once during a trip.

Plus if you have a nice hotel room (or tend to log 20,000 steps a day as a tourist), room service proves a way to relax and soak in your room’s great view or terrific interior design. I still dream of the pastries, honeyed yogurt, and strong coffee my husband and I downed sitting on a balcony overlooking Santorini’s caldera at Katikies Hotel. At a recent conference in Tampa, my JW Marriott suite was so plush that I skipped dinner and stayed in one night. Tucked into the enormous king bed in my PJs, I watched Netflix and ate Key lime pie.

The bad and overpriced

Still “there are many sad room service stories,” says Gerba. “Maybe you wait a long time for your food to arrive, or the French fries are cold—or entirely missing from your order.” Plus I’ve found that fancier, cheffier foods—almost every fish, elegant soups—don’t travel as well as a BLT or a slice of chocolate cake.

Modern room service prices—combined with delivery fees and taxes—sometimes make breakfasting in your bathrobe cost prohibitive, the sort of rockstar, rich-person binge my Mother guarded against all those years ago. “My biggest peeve is when room service bills are overinflated, since you’re probably not getting a game-changing meal,” says Brandon Berkson, the founder of lodgings review site Hotels Above Par. “Forty dollars is just way too high for a Nicoise salad. That gives me rip-off vibes.”

Me? I hate it when room service entails a random hotel employee handing me a bag of food, like some overpaid Uber Eats driver. If I’m shelling out, I want the pomp of a cart, a tray, and maybe a nice flower in a tiny vase.

I’m fancy like that.

Note: Beginning next week, every other post will be paywalled. So please consider a paid subscription to support my work. (It costs about what a latte does!) Twice a month, I’ll continue to provide free travel and shopping stories.

Callan Swenson contributed research to this story.

Millions of kids ask this question when their parents return from trips. The nearly universal query partially explains why airport shops are crammed with “I Love Houston” sweatshirts or chocolates in the shape of Mongolian yurts.

I don’t remember grubbing for souvenir mugs or magnets as a child, maybe because my parents usually took my younger sister Sally and me traveling with them. On the road we used our allowance to buy treasures—a china doll dressed as Martha Washington at Mount Vernon, a rubber python from the gift shop at the Snake Farm, a cheesy reptile house outside of our San Antonio hometown.

But that changed the morning my father Hal arrived home from his first-ever trip to London. In his early 40s, Hal had never been abroad until that spring of 1980, when he traveled to the UK to spend a week collaborating with a fellow political science professor.

He fell hard for the Brits. When he got home, jet-lagged Hal woke his grouchy offspring at dawn to share his enthusiasm. Sally and I walked into the dining room, blearily taking in the buffet of souvenirs spread across the dark wood table. There were T-shirts emblazoned with tall-hatted King’s Guards for us both and a jigsaw puzzle depicting a thatch-roofed cottage in the Yorkshire countryside for me. Best of all were two guinea pig-sized stuffed Paddington Bear dolls in raincoats and floppy hats. They clutched miniature suitcases we knew were jammed with the fictional bear’s favorite orange marmalade sandwiches.

Sally and I were delighted with this Christmas in April, but Hal seemed equally chuffed with the experience. “We’ll go to England as a family next summer, and you’ll see some of these things in person,” he crowed.

Sally, barely six years old, widened her eyes. “Will we get to meet Paddington?”

Why Do We Even Bring Gifts Home?

Dad didn’t buy us those gifts out of obligation along the lines of a “My Parents Went to (insert place here) and All They Bought Me Was this Crummy T-shirt.” He was drumming up enthusiasm for future trips, seeding a curiosity in his children about people and places far away. “I think bringing a gift back from a trip can be about sharing the experience, about giving the recipient a taste of the culture or place,” says Crystal Bailey, director of the Etiquette Institute of Washington.

The concept of conveying people tokens from far away predates recorded history and likely began as a way to broker peace or pay tribute. (Think about those three kings trying to impress baby Jesus with frankincense and myrrh.)

Scientific studies show that presenting a cadeau is as beneficial to the giver (if not more so) as it is to the recipient. “People don’t necessarily want a refrigerator magnet you pick up in Amsterdam,” says Julian Givi, a professor of marketing at West Virginia University who has extensively studied the psychology of gift giving. “But the person giving the souvenir believes that they are being thoughtful.”

Some cultures have a stronger “I came, I saw, I bought you something” tradition. In Japan, omiyage are gifts you bring home from a trip, usually local products—a tin of Osaka rice crackers, a box of Twinkie-like cakes called Tokyo Banana. They’re meant to be shared, not to collect dust or waste away on a shelf. Shops in tourist areas, airports, and bullet train stations specialize in omiyage as well as temiyage, small mementos to use as hostess gifts.

“Japanese people are obsessed with omiyage when they travel,” says Rachel Ng, a Nevada-based writer whose Japanese-born mother introduced her to the concept. “My mom always shops for her friends when she goes places. She spends most of her time in gift shops!”

So Should I Bring a Gift?

If you aren’t Japanese, the answer is “maybe.” If you return home from three weeks in Mexico, and your cousin took care of your cat for free, a “gracias” bottle of tequila or some colorful Oaxacan napkins seem in order.

Visit a destination known for a certain craft (Asheville pottery) or a notable spice (Indian curry), and you might want to stock up on a few mementos to parlay into future hostess gifts. “My grandma would say, ‘don’t show up with your arm swinging,’” Bailey says. “Bringing something small might add to an event, but an item from your travels means a lot more than whatever you picked up by the register at the Wawa.”

I wax and wane on buying gifts when I travel. Giving a friend Peruvian llama alpaca socks or a Murano glass ring from Venice could say, “I was thinking of you” or “I hope you visit this place too.” But of-a-place talismans sometimes signify little to someone who wasn’t along for the Moroccan camel ride or the Grand Canyon hike.

“My grandma would say, ‘don’t show up with your arm swinging,’” says etiquette expert Crystal Bailey.

Back on that 1980s morning, my father’s British gifts inspired a lot of magical thinking. With a little effort I turned my puzzle into a country landscape. And those stuffed Paddington bears became shrunken diplomats, creating a sense of anticipation for two Texas kids who had not yet ventured outside the U.S.

By the time my family hopped a Braniff jet to Heathrow the next summer, Sally and I had made lists of places to visit (Buckingham Palace, a toy museum). And while my father couldn’t introduce us to the “real” Paddington, he took us shopping at Fortnum & Mason, where jars of lime, orange, and lemon marmalade were stacked to the ceiling. Surely our favorite bear had just left the building?

The Lincoln Memorial incongruously dangles next to the Alamo and a Mexican burro brays beside the Cupid Statue from London’s Piccadilly Circus on my mother’s silver charm bracelet. As a kid, I was fascinated by the chain strung with two dozen or so miniaturized world monuments.

My mother Carol—clad in a groovy 1970s maxi dress—would breeze out to dinner parties with my father, the bracelet often chiming at her wrist. When she bent down to peck me goodbye, I’d gently touch a charm and ask for its story, like the Caribbean palm tree next to the San Francisco cable car. “Oh, your Daddy bought that for me when we were on our honeymoon in Puerto Rico,” she said. “He had too many daiquiris and fell out of a beach hammock!”

Interspersed with other amulets—Mom’s opal birthstone, a headshot of my baby sister rendered in silver—the bracelet was as much biography as bijoux. “Charm bracelets are a way to wear your memories,” says Nicole Parker King, the founder of Jet Set Candy, a jewelry company specializing in travel charms, from a teeny gold Japanese pagoda the length of a fingernail to a Barbie-sized silver passport with pages you can open. “Charms are small, and you can look down and see so many different places that you’ve been.”

A Charmed History

Wearing talismans on your neck or wrist dates back for millennia—think Turkish evil eye charms or Egyptians buried with scarab pendants. Victorian women loved lockets; their men peacocked around with fancy pocket-watch fobs studded with onyx or carnelian stones.

But it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that charm bracelets jingled into fashion. Fueled by post-World War II prosperity and the rise of leisure travel, ladies from Atlanta to Amsterdam started collecting charms and affixing them to gold, silver, or base-metal chains. There were even charm-of-the-month clubs.

“Women whose own mothers and grandmothers had never left the farm or shtetl began to go abroad,” says jewelry designer and author Tracey Zabar in her book Charmed Bracelets. “Souvenir travel charms boasted of these trips around the world—or more locally, around the state.”

The bracelets have jangled in and out of style since then, but the charms themselves never vanish. “Sometimes, if dainty jewelry is in vogue, you’ll see a few small charms on a light chain,” says King. “You can even hang them from an earring.”

Where the Charms Are

Souvenir silver and gold charms used to headline at gift shops and museum stores around the world. That’s how my mother acquired her quarter-inch tall Empire State Building and a shrunken replica of the statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s hometown.

Now, you’re more likely to find them at jewelry shops. I recently picked up a gold and turquoise scarab pendant at a boutique in Luxor, Egypt. James Avery stores around Texas shape silver and gold into wearable symbols of the Lone Star State and other locales. Jet Set Candy, with its flagship boutique in New York City’s Grand Central Station, offers wee silver or gold passport stamps from dozens of countries, pea-sized globes, and chains to put them on. “People also buy charms of ‘home and away’—where they live and where they visit,” says King.

Giving old charms new magic

Or you might, like me, inherit your mother’s charm bracelet, giving a loved one’s memories another life, another spin around the dance floor. My dear friend and fellow writer Anna Kahoe has the bracelet her father gifted to her Spanish-born mother, Conchita. “It has Kennedy dollars and charms of castanets and bullfighters on it, so it’s a melding of the U.S. and Spain,” she says.

Vintage bracelets—or single charms—are plentiful on eBay and Etsy, too. I turned up a bracelet festooned with shield-shaped charms from Austrian ski towns and another gold-tone piece showing off a teeny Arc de Triomphe and a sombrero emblazoned “Acapulco.”

Researching this story, I fell for a tinkly number holding 21 enameled U.S. state charms. When I slip it on, the jaunty yellow Arizona, green New Mexico, and red Massachusetts clang together, the soundtrack of an epic road trip.

“Charm bracelets have multiple totems for how you might live differently,” says Kahoe. She sometimes wears a silver charm bracelet she won at an auction. It’s decorated with baubles including a circle engraved, “Good luck Ginny,” and a mouse-sized Hofbrauhaus mug. “I feel like I’m part of Ginny’s family,” she says. “I have the hieroglyphics of her life.”

The trips my mother took are far in the past. But when I wear her bracelet, I think of who she might’ve met in London or what wonders she saw in France. There are still open links on the chain—maybe it’s time to add a few mementos of my own?

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What kind of weird seven-year-old girl plays with a Mexican serpent in a box? One, like me, who grew up in San Antonio, where everything from the toys to the food have one boot in the U.S. and another south of the border.

I discovered the wooden snake boxes (viborita en caja) on weekend visits to my hometown’s Mexican market, El Mercado. The size of a deck of playing cards, the traditional South American toy has a tiny button on one side. Slide it back and—snap!—you get “bitten” by a tiny wooden snake with a wire tongue.

My parents often took me and my younger sister Sally to San Antonio’s storied downtown market. We trod on stones where Spanish friars, indigenous people, and early European settlers had converged since 1730. Back then, shoppers bought turkeys, pecans, and steaming bowls of spicy beef stew (aka chili). Mom and Dad came to El Mercado in search of dried chiles and pottery swirled with painted flowers.

Sally and I were bewitched by the market’s pig-shaped piñatas, smiling, beribboned dolls, and those snake boxes. The last always pricked my finger and made Sally cry, probably why we were never allowed to buy viboritas.

But wandering El Mercado’s exterior brick colonnades, under multicolored, flapping papel picado banners was a game all its own. Outside, mariachis strummed guitars and sang mournful songs incongruous with the clear Texas sunshine. Street vendors sold limonada and gorditas (pita-like corn pockets stuffed with beans and cheese).

Inside the covered market, a glass case labeled “El Chupacabra” held a snarling, taxidermic dog positioned on its hind legs. “That’s just a mangy stuffed mutt,” insisted my father. Sally and I were sure it was the legendary Latino, blood-sucking canine monster that kids whispered about at school.

Less creepy: the dozens of Mexican souvenir puestos (stalls) where we shook striped maracas and wondered at Mexican jumping beans, peanut-like seed pods that magically hopped and twitched in your palm. (It was years before I learned that moth larvae were gestating inside them.)

El Mercado, just blocks from the Alamo, has siren called me back ever since. As a teenager, I’d go on dates amid the riotous décor of Mi Tierra restaurant. A jumbo oil painting of Tejana singer Selena gazed down as I debated which Mexican praline or pastry to share with a boy. I sipped my first tequila with college girlfriends at La Margarita, another Tex-Mex restaurant at the market. We’d loopily tip the handsome mariachis to play ballads like Guantanamera and De Colores.

Now I live on the East Coast, and El Mercado is a pilgrimage site whenever I return. Visiting the market summons a borderlands childhood where I ate more chorizo-and-egg breakfast tacos than omelets and listened to more conjunto music than country songs. I show up to shop and eat, an eastern-southwestern hybrid wearing Lucchese cowboy boots under a Rachel Comey dress from Brooklyn, an annoying yanqui who asks waiters for more salsa and tips on improving my own enchilada recipe.

What to buy and eat at El Mercado

Head to El Mercado during the spring, and shops overflow with 12-packs of cascarones. These are the same sort of colorfully spray-painted, confetti-filled eggs that Sally and I cracked over each other’s heads during Fiesta, San Antonio’s citywide festival saluting Mexican heritage.

Besides the satisfying crunch of eggshells followed by a cascade of confetti, visitors who come during the 10-day party can also witness (and buy) what my high-school friends and I called Fiestawear. That means hitting mercado stalls to pick up paper flower crowns or embroidered dresses and blouses from Oaxaca and Chiapas. (Try the second floor at Los Pueblitos for the best stock.)

Then and now, I’d pair one of the folksy dresses with modern shoes (high-top Converse in the 80s, Prada platform sandals today). Nearby, Mexico en la Piel offers up tooled leather bags I buy as gifts and caballero-chic belts I use to twang up my wide-legged denim.

During the winter, my mother would come to the market for holiday decorations and serving dishes. She’d pick up green and red papal picado banners to drape on the fireplace mantel and Talavera pottery platters from Puebla to hold the tamales we ate every Christmas Eve. Stalls throughout El Mercado still overflow with similar finds, as well as Day of the Dead paper mâché skeletons and grinning skull mugs.

Still, since my childhood, El Mercado has grown more globalized and a bit less Mexican. Dealers hawk made-in-China ponchos emblazoned with the Virgin of the Guadalupe, there are fewer spangled velvet sombreros, and many of the toys are plastic, not wood. The Chupacabra was taken down years ago.

Still, Mi Tierra’s puffy tacos and gooey conchas pastries taste like home. On weekends, folk dancers and Tejano bands perform on the plaza. El Mercado continues, like San Antonio, to float in a happy convergence between America and Mexico.

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On my last visit, I happened on Regalos, a hip Mexican import shop I’d never seen before. Its name means “gifts” in Spanish, and it carries many items worth giving: bathrobes in serape-stripe prints, cactus-fruit scented candles, Day of the Dead art.

I was delighted the shop also sold milagros. The traditional Mexican tin charms—shaped like hearts, legs, and eyes—are meant to heal pains and dispel trouble. I bought a tiny heart to keep in my wallet, both a memento and charm.

As the sales clerk wrapped up my purchase, I spotted a familiar sight: a small bin of snake boxes. “Oh my god, I loved these as a kid,” I crowed. The clerk smiled and put one into my bag. “It’s on me,” she said.

Maybe I’ll send it to Sally.

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There were multiple smallish, rectangular packages under the Christmas tree when I was growing up. Peeling or ripping back the shiny foil paper (my extravagant father’s choice) or simple tissue and yarn wrapping (Mom’s trademark), my sister Sally and I discovered that most of the rectangles were books. That might mean a Judy Blume novel for teenage me or a New Orleans cookbook for my cheffy Dad

We bookworm-ish Bargers often grabbed our new reading material (and the chocolate from our stockings) before retreating to different corners of the house. I usually nabbed the squishy wing chair upholstered in a pebbly, avocado peel-colored fabric, woefully ugly, but big enough for me and Muff, the dog. I’d throw my legs over one arm, the dog rested her silky brown head on the other.

Many of the books were travel guides, preparatory presents for a trip, signaling another, greater gift in the future. One year, before a summer jaunt to England, it was a London picture book for my six-year-old sister. As we got older, my parents gave Sally and me travel journals. They gifted each other skinny, green-covered Michelin guides to whichever family holiday they were plotting next—Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Spain.

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When my mother was sick with cancer in 1997, my father wrapped up Frommer’s guides to South Africa and the south of France. She didn’t live long enough to take those longed-for trips, but the facts and photos inside the books amounted to a gift of hope, jetting her on armchair voyages.

The gift of a vintage travel guide

I still give people travel books, especially vintage volumes that conjure other places during other times. I wish I’d saved a few of my parents’ 1980s “Europe on $20 a Day” books to for nieces and friends’ kids getting ready to study abroad.

I’ve collected a few old travel books about my longtime hometown, Washington, D.C., as well as about San Antonio, where I grew up and went to college. I pop them open to read about streets and landmarks I recognize (The Alamo, the U.S. Capitol) described in unfamiliar, florid prose. The pages also hold time-warp illustrations: horse-drawn carriages sweeping past the White House, finned 1950s cars parked in downtown San Antonio.

“I do like buying old guidebooks, and sometimes give them as presents,” says British travel journalist Sarah Turner (she writes about her hobby here.) “Time Out guides to London in someone’s birth year have gone down really well.”

You can find older travel tomes on eBay, Etsy, at used bookshops, or via the Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore. The last stocks treasures such as a 1903 Baedeker’s “Norway and Sweden” and books from the Works Progress Administration’s American Guide Series, which launched during the Depression. “The WPA guides were done for every U.S. state—it was then just 48—with offset-printed photographs,” says Stefan Baer, owner of the Complete Traveller. “The quality just blows you away, and many of them have uncredited writing from famous authors like Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston.”

Baer sells books to collectors, fans of particular countries or cities (Beaumont, Texas, anyone?), and authors working on historical fiction. “A novelist might be interested in how Vienna was in the 1900s,” he says. “Like how long were the horse cab rides, what was the best hotel?”

Thumb through a vintage guide (careful—decades-old pages can be brittle!), and you’ll learn both about a destination’s landscape and its past lives. “I like them when they’ve been annotated, as well,” Turner says. “Signs of use are more appealing to me than pristine. Is there anything worse than an unread vintage guidebook?”

My old travel guides cast places I know in a nostalgic, sepia-toned light, revealing long-gone buildings and customs. In the 1959 “San Antonio: A Historical and Pictorial Guide,” Charles Ramsdell writes, “this remains an old town. The ancient buildings stand: the brooding Alamo, the missions. You tread, unknowing, in the footsteps of men who died more than a century, two centuries ago.”

In the musty-smelling pages of my 1888 “Picturesque Washington” guide there are tips on taking horse carriage tours and calling upon residents at the White House. “The President is usually ‘at home’ to those who desire to pay their respects to him,” it reads. “But being a man of many important affairs, he frequently keeps his visitors waiting for an hour or two.”

Maybe a new travel book?

A new travel guide can signal “surprise, we’re flying to Cabo next month!” or provide a deep dive into a place or subject the recipient loves. (Don’t have a holiday gift for me yet? Assouline’s mammoth, coffee table tome, “Moroccan Decorative Arts” costs $250, far cheaper than a flight from Washington, D.C. to Marrakech!)

A slew of wanderlusty titles published this year would also be thoughtful last-sec presents. Two of my fellow National Geographic alums produced new books: Annie Fitzsimmons wrote “100 Hotels of a Lifetime,” revealing some of the world’s best places to lay your head, and Andrew Nelson penned “Here Not There,” which details destination dupes for over-touristed zones. (In the latter, I’m noting down this little-seen alterna Taj Mahal as I plot my trip to India for 2025.)

Mark Johanson’s “Mars on Earth” winds readers through Chile’s Atacama Desert. (Mark was one of my top writers when I was on staff at Nat Geo—no wonder this is a ripping read.)

Streaming Brit hit shows “Black Doves” and “Slow Horses” has me hankering for a long weekend in London, so I’m gifting myself “Don’t be a Tourist in London” by Vanessa Grall. Her Messy Nessy website, Paris boutique, and other books on New York and Paris are terrific resources for travelers interested in quirky cafes, flea market finds, and far-from-the-madding-crowds museums.

A tiny wooden St. Bernard from a mountain village in Switzerland. A fuzzy wool sheep from the Scottish Highlands. A ceramic dove from Portugal. Wherever Jane Killebrew and her husband, Jon Kay (pictured, below), go, they purchase a holiday ornament.

“Our tree is decorated with 100 percent travel souvenirs or kid memories,” says Killebrew, a retired brewing industry exec. “Plus our cat, Scarlett [pictured, above], loves to sit under its branches hanging out with the wooden Pinocchio dolls we bought in Italy.”

A 2024 study by ABTA Travel Money found that many travelers are shopping for fewer souvenirs, citing financial and environmental concerns. But holiday ornaments twinklingly buck that trend.

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“I travel so much, and could be weighed down with souvenirs I will never really appreciate,” says travel writer and author Marcia DeSanctis. “But an ornament is something I will always love. Once a year, I can look at a compendium of all my travels in my living room.”

I amass ornaments when I travel, too. My tree currently glows with a painted wooden bell from Prague, a mouse-sized nutcracker dressed as a Mountie from Ontario, and a leather camel from Morocco that, frankly, smells of dirty socks.

Below, you’ll find ornaments readers and friends shared with me. I’d love to see and hear more about any tannenbaum trinkets you’ve picked up on the road.

Crafts to hang on the tree

An object made in or near your destination to dangle from your boughs—or gift to a pal—supports local artisans and helps to preserve traditional crafts.

“I bought a school of silk tasseled fish on my first trip to Hong Kong and China in 1985. It was the first big trip I had made alone, and it was both terrifying and exhilarating. It launched a lifetime of global travel.”—Jane Wooldridge, Miami travel and arts writer

“Whenever we go to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I spend hours browsing the Mercado de Artesanias. Vendors there sell a rainbow array of tin Christmas ornaments. I inevitably pick up a few speaking to the spirit of the season or alluding to my hobbies and interests.”—Nevin Martell, Maryland writer, author, and forager (second photo, right)

“Twenty years ago this coming summer my wife Cathy and I traveled to China to adopt our daughter, Claire,. We visited a cloisonné workshop and watched craftspeople shape copper wire into intricate patterns and deftly apply colored enamel. We bought several ornaments, including these mama and baby pandas. They remind us of the ‘Christmas in July’ when we received the gift of becoming parents.”—Randy Steward, healthcare exec, Los Angeles

People and places

Interesting (often famous!) people and notable sites inspire many of us to hit the roads or skies. Grab a souvenir ornament of a landmark or local character, and you’ll bring home a token of their charisma or some of that architectural flourish.

Subscriber Kayla Johnson, a beer industry consultant from Los Angeles (right), bought a mini Eiffel Tower in Paris.

“I collect ornaments from local attractions as well as farther-flung destinations. I bought this felt one of George Washington at Mount Vernon. It shows the founding father on his famous horse, Blueskin.”—Amy Alipio, travel editor, Maryland

“I bought this Hawaiian angel during one of my trips to Kauai, where my parents had a timeshare. She reminds me of all the wonderful memories my family created in Hawaii. Now, my parents are getting older, and my dad sold the timeshare. I feel that our trips to Kauai are a thing of the past. Yet, every time I see this ornament, she brings a spark of joy.”—Barbara Noe Kennedy, travel writer, Virginia (third from left in first photo)

Well-traveled subscribers Tom Natan and Cy Behroozi purchase ornaments frequently on the road, including these shoe bijoux from Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, Alaska’s Denali National Park, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. “They could represent walking into new places,” says Behroozi. “Tom says it’s because I’m a shoe queen!”

A close friend gave reader Michele Johnson, a lobbyist from Washington, D.C., this Prince ornament from Minneapolis. Johnson (left, in white boots) also visited his Paisley Park headquarters there. “I went the day before I saw Taylor Swift, and it was a great experience,” she says.

My evil eye bracelet broke the afternoon of the U.S. presidential election. A dear friend had brought the plastic fantastic stretchy thing back from a trip to Uzbekistan. I’d worn the ring of blue and white orbs whenever I left the house during the COVID-19 lockdowns, an amulet against viruses, the noxious breath of other people, disturbing U.S. politics.

I’m not a slavish believer in talismans, but the thing had served me well through a global epidemic and some bumpy years. But on November 4th, the elastic filament inside the beads snapped as I slipped the bracelet on, leaving a small pile of nickel-sized eyeballs peering up from my dresser. I went to the office sans bling in my Harris Walz tee and black blazer.

The bracelet can be restrung, of course. (All roads somehow lead back to the jewelry supply aisle at Michaels.) But the timing was off. I was boarding a night flight to Istanbul on November 5, and after the depressing election results that morning, my busted lucky charm seemed ominous. Had I accidentally caused American democracy to fall by putting on my stack of arm candy?

On the ground in cloudy, chilly Istanbul for a writers’ conference, I strolled the cobblestones of the historic Sultanahmet district, zigzagging toward the Grand Bazaar and its warren of shops and hawkers. In business since around 1455, these days, the immense covered market holds more fake designer handbag dealers than magic carpet shops. Young Turks, 99 percent men, stand in front of their stalls smoking, gently admonishing passersby to come in, have some tea, and buy.

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But every third stall twinkles with unblinking Mediterranean glass blue eyes. They range from dinner plate-sized orbs dangling from awnings to macrame wall hangings festooned with a half dozen eyeballs the diameter of quarters. There are ceramic spoon rests painted with dozens of eyes (“Away, bad tasting soup!”), evil eye beach bags (“Scram, rain!”), and even a round ashtray in brilliant blue with a white pupil at its center (“Begone, lung cancer?”)

Technically known as nazars, evil eyes are meant to repel the negative emotions other people might cast your way—envy, spite, bitterness. “The actual evil eye—or il malocchio—is a baneful glance that can cause bad luck to erupt,” said Antonio Pagliarulo, author of The Evil Eye: The History, Mystery & Magic of the Quiet Curse. “Nazars are the amulets used against the evil eye. They protect you by deflecting the bad energy.”

Eye charms might be most prevalent—or best marketed—in Turkey. There are even woe-specific nazars there: an evil eye shaped like an owl to bring wisdom, a fish-shaped one for luck or fertility. But many cultures have used similar ocular symbols for thousands of years.

Last year when I traveled around Egypt, I kept spotting the Eye of Horus on ancient temple walls and pendants in gold shops. The heavily lined eye represents healing and redemption, and stems from the story of the falcon god Horus, who lost and regained an eye.

In Mexico and New Mexico, ojos de dios (God’s eyes) are diamond-shaped weavings executed on crisscrossed sticks, signifying prayers for thriving children, good crops, and other blessings. I remember making them from toothpicks and colored yarn in Sunday school as a Southwestern kid; one still hangs on my holiday tree every year.

Jet-lagged and dragged down by the election results, I didn’t buy any evil eyes in Istanbul. But the symbols followed me on a weekend side trip to Cappadocia, the Anatolian region known for surreal, Dali-esque rock formations. Early Christians and others carved churches and cave homes into the zone’s sandstone chimneys and mountains, creating a landscape out of a sci-fi epic or a fever dream.

Overlooking Cappadocia’s stone valleys pockmarked with ancient caves, residents have covered a few dead trees with hundreds of evil eyes. From a distance, the trees seem to bloom with exotic flowers. Come closer, and you’ll spot tourists lined up to take selfies and hear the eyes clicking in the wind.

It’s hard not to feel comforted by the sheer number of protective talismans hanging from their branches. The evil eye trees become optimistic, “take that troubles!” shrines, even in Turkey, where the political turmoil and oppressive government serve as chilly warnings for America.

“It’s human nature to want to explain things, to feel like something in the sky or in the air wants to help you,” said Bunyamin Ozmen, my tour guide in Cappadocia. “The evil eye does that. It transcends religion and time and becomes universal.”

At a market in Göreme, one of Cappadocia’s prettiest towns, I spotted a rack covered in nazar bracelets in blues, greens, even yellows. The pea-sized glass beads were tightly strung, and seemed ready for battle. I picked up a few for myself and friends. Maybe I’ll wear one with my old eye bracelet, once I’ve put it back together.

“But I wouldn’t worry about damaging that bracelet,” said Pagliarula. “If you break an evil eye, it just means it’s doing the job protecting you. It took the hit for you!”

Though the name of this Substack suggests otherwise, I don’t travel just to shop. I’m more interested in eating mole when I’m in Oaxaca next month than in buying the region’s famous black pottery. (Though I look forward to seeing how both are made.) Art museum visits in Paris always beat ogling the Louis Vuitton flagship—and I favor the flea market there, anyhow.

On some trips, memories and a few stellar snapshots prove the best souvenirs. Plus many keepsakes are free, objects of happenstance gathered along the journey: a plastic water bottle of powdery Sahara sand from Morocco, a handful of creased entrance tickets to ancient Egyptian temples. Such scraps of a place morph into talismans when the moment and the trip is long past.

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When I do buy goods for myself or others on the road, I hunt for things imbued with meaning, memories, a story. (Hopefully better tales than, “Look, this magnet says ‘Venice,’ but it was made in China!” or “I bought these boring white Nikes in Oslo because I packed poorly and got blisters. The End.”)

It helps to think of travel purchases in three categories, pardon the cheeseball rhyme: shareables (gifts, aka local candy or Christmas ornaments), wearables (clothing, either vintage or by a local designer), and only-there-ables (crafts or goods you can’t find anywhere else).

With those shareable presents, if you water my houseplants/work one cubicle over from me/are just someone I love, I might score you some chocolates at the airport—yurt-shaped bonbons from Mongolia, camel milk chocolate from Casablanca. Ask me for something cool from somewhere else? I’ll cram Thai Hill Tribe purses into my carry-on or roll up a couple of Mexican otomi pillow covers in my suitcase.

I met the weaver who made the Moroccan rug hanging in my stairwell and chatted with the Sydney, Australia designer who created my louche velvet leopard blazer, which makes them more valuable to me, and far from disposable. (You probably won’t have such fond recollections of buying sunblock at 7-Eleven in Vegas or scoring bargain cashmere at a J. Crew in Manhattan.)

Here are a few more of my favorite things. And please, please share your top souvenirs—plus photos of them and stories of how and where you scored them. I want to make this a community of savvy, stylish travelers and I need your input!

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 “I’m going to quit my job and open a shop called Souvenirland,” joked my father Hal, rolling his eyes as my fashionable mother, Carol, younger sister Sally, and I beelined for the gift shop at the Vatican Museums in Rome. “Souvenirland will sell mementos from all around the world, and it’ll just be at your local mall. No more boring, expensive vacations to national parks or European churches!”

It was the mid 1980s, and, for the umpteenth family vacation, the women in my father’s life were demonstrating as much enthusiasm for a historic destination’s retail as its museums, as much passion for mindless window-shopping as for eating the local pasta carbonara. We hadn’t even visited the Sistine Chapel or the Vatican, and teenage me was already pawing through the gift shop postcards as my mother tried on a scarf.

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My father hated gift shops. He wanted to gorge on Roman statues, old churches, and porchetta sandwiches; Sally and I were content to idle in toy stores selling wooden puppets or watch my mother try on smooth, elbow-length gloves at the sweet-smelling leather stores near the Spanish Steps.

As we traipsed down the Vatican’s endless hallways, my father was gleeful. We passed hordes of marble statues and innumerable paintings of Jesus and Mary. (“The Pope needs a golden skateboard to get around here faster,” said my mother.)  But even my sullen tween sister gasped at the Sistine Chapel, though was she impressed with Michelangelo’s jumbo God and Adam or the handsome, slim-suited guards repeating “Silencio” to the noisy tourists?

The stores and crafts sellers in the streets outside the Vatican were equally entrancing. A bit of cash could net you a plastic figure of a gladiator, a shrunken version of Michelangelo’s “David” trapped in a snow globe, or a cheap calendar showcasing a different luridly colored saint each month. (“Young lady, you are not Catholic, you’re Unitarian,” said my mother, snatching the calendar from my hands.)

I bought a tiny metal pillbox from an older woman, her hair tied back in a bright silk scarf. She had spread a folding table with mosaic-embellished trinkets: brooches, pencil cups, earrings. The box, barely larger than the agnolotti my family later snarfed in a trattoria, had a lid encrusted with bits of blue, pink and white marble. It looked like floors we’d just seen in the Vatican.

At Gammarelli, a tailor to the clergy since 1798, we ogled papal robes and bishop’s cassocks. Laypeople can’t purchase those, but the same oddly flashy knee-high red socks that Catholic cardinals wear are still a popular souvenir. They even seduced my father, who bought a pair. The next day, when he slipped them on with loafers and a pair of white linen pants (bought at a Roman department store), he seemed more confident and sophisticated, transformed by travel. Another possible Souvenirland client.

Spoiler alert: Hal didn’t leave his teaching gig to found a knickknack megastore. But his joke—or was it a divine intervention?—endured. Now, as a travel writer and memento hunter, I’m fulfilling his Souvenirland prophecy. Sort of.

From the blue glass evil eyes of Turkey to the breezy pastel dresses of Stockholm clothing designers, the material goods of different cultures and communities often drive my travel. On both personal and work trips—first as a fashion editor at the Washington Post, later as a longtime travel editor at National Geographic—I always build in a few hours for treasure hunting.

Sometimes I’m seeking homegrown crafts and the people who make them–shaggy Moroccan tribal rugs woven by women in the Atlas Mountains, black clay pottery shaped by artisans in Oaxaca, Mexico. Other times, I’m just looking, eyeballing what the spice sellers are touting in Marrakech’s souks or which shoes the cool girls in Copenhagen are wearing this summer.

Through all my wandering and browsing, I’m trying less to amass a house full of tchotchkes (or a closet full of caftans) than I am to understand new places better, to walk on their carpets, try on their soccer jerseys, and drink out of their handmade cups. I’ve watched nomads make camel felt rugs in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, hunted for vintage dresses in the Paris flea market, and learned to weave silk beside the Mekong River in Laos.

When I do buy a souvenir, it’s usually an attempt to bring back a totem of how I felt and what I did somewhere far from home. I can’t keep time in a bottle, but I can preserve a great trip with a silver bracelet from Santa Fe or a basket from Botswana.

Today, the little Italian box sits on my dressing table, snuggled amid the perfume bottles and sunblock. It holds a few lira coins from those pre-Euro days. I crack it open, touch the old money, and flash back to that Italian summer. I’m in a polka dotted sundress and a frizzy perm, pretending to be Sophia Loren. And just ahead of me on a sun-flashed piazza, there’s my late father, flashing his red socks.

I hope you’ll read this newsletter and come along for the ride. The Souvenirist will brim with my recommendations and discoveries about where to shop and what to buy out in the wide, wide world. Along the way, I’ll dive into the history of local crafts, reveal the most stylish hotels in shopping meccas, and scout interesting homegrown brands and independent shops.