The cool thing about cannabis-related gifts is that (1) they are not limited by season, and (2) they never go out of style (if you leave out innovations in delivery technology, like dab rigs and tinctures).
In any case, gifts for your marijuana-using friends and self are abundant, creative, and, often, beautiful.
Our visits to cannabis trade shows hosted by NECANN in Boston, MA and Portland, ME introduced us to many highly technical growers and processors, and also to many artistic people who are creating works of art around cannabis and marijuana paraphernalia.
At the Maine cannabis show, we met the creative tinkerers behind Maine Cannabis Gifts, based in Auburn. Co-owners Joe and Lisa Elichaa sold a commercial building a few years ago to a cannabis retailer. Joe Elichaa didn’t get along well with retirement, so he began helping around the new business, soon inventing a useful type of apron, called the leafing debris apron, as a convenience for workers trimming and pulling leaves. Then he acquired a bunch of unused wooden platters in a friend’s barn (so Maine) and began to carve and develop them into a line of beautiful dab rig trays.
(Elichaa reworked some of the raw wood into ordinary service trays, with a laser-drawn image of a lobster, with a joint in his claw.)
Next, the couple, and their daughter, Kryston Lemay, found some cool old metal cans with sealed lids and a drop-in strainer, once used for cleaning paintbrushes. They re-created the cans as devices to clean marijuana flowers. Their table at the Maine cannabis show also sported a collection of colorful (and real) small lobster claws repurposed as roach clips.
You love jewelry? Join the crowd. High Point Jewelry, at the Boston show, has a bevy of beautiful silver pendants with delicate images of the marijuana leaf. Even more fun is a pendant composed of silver bars and stones representing the THC and the CBD molecules. A representative of the company called these necklaces “the secret handshake” because they can act as a discreet indicator of cannabis respect among people operating in the straight world.
(As if you need another reason of love High Point, the company says it will donate 100 percent of the purchase price of its “Legalize It” to The Last Prisoner Project, a non-profit organization that works to reform our country’s unjust ineffective drug policies.)
Back at the Maine show, the Naked Farmer booth displayed a collection of plants in blissfully old-fashioned plastic cups alongside a display of CBD-infused soaps and farm-made beeswax candles crafted to the enticing shape of the female form.
Show guests’ eyes were (a little) bugged out at the 3-D images of marijuana buds created by Gary Langevin and Sheri Roberts, co-owners of Nu-Venture LLC. Langevin, a Massachusetts native now living in Montana, said the stunning 3-D images are created by a unique printing process called lenticular printing. As a viewer moves from side to side, three versions of the image meld from one into the next. The business began with images of animals – a wolf that seems to track your movements, a shivering hummingbird—and has moved partly into sexy and nearly irresistible images of weed.
The images pulled passersby into the Nu-Venture booth in Portland, and no wonder. Langevin and Roberts were showing, among many other works, a bud photographed with a scanning electron microscope with a magnification of 1200 times – turning a one-eighth-inch-long bud into a 24-inch-wide picture that seems to breath with life.
Of course, beautiful bongs and pipes of all manner of colored glass and materials like soapstone are easy to find, and always make stunning gifts for pot enthusiasts.
At the New England shows, we also enjoyed weed-themed socks by Foozys of New England; vaporizers and other paraphernalia from Buried Treasures, based in Allston and Boston, MA; and body spray and roll on oils by Healing Rose.
