An Advent Calendar Filled with Pot

Who doesn't love a gift-giving warm-up for a holiday dedicated to giving gifts? Most advent calendars are stuffed with gifts that aren't even worthy of being stuffed into a stocking, but Dockside Cannabis in Sodo has fixed that problem with their Cannabis ADVENTure Calendars.

The calendars come as a string of 12 fabric bags that look like they could be hung across Martha Stewart's holiday fireplace. Each one is filled with a different kind of product—from regular old flower to yummy edibles to peppermint breath strips. Dockside is selling four different versions, priced from $79 to $329. Finally, an advent calendar worth getting excited about.

A Gadget to Make Better Homemade Edibles

As anyone who's made magic brownies at home before knows, you can't just stir weed into the batter. You have to heat up the weed to turn the THCA into THC. That's why if you just eat a bunch of raw flower, you're not going to get high. What gets you high is heating the flower with a lighter and inhaling.

This process of THCA becoming THC is called decarboxylation. If you smoke your weed, you don't have to worry about it, because decarboxylation is a natural part of the process. But how do you decarboxylate your weed if you're making edibles? Most home cooks do it by using a conventional oven or stove top and warming the weed in butter and then straining the butter through cheesecloth, but that's a pain in the ass and the tools are imprecise. Inevitably, you either leave some THC still in its THCA state or accidentally burn off some of the THC and essential oils that you want to retain.

That's where a professional device like a NOVA Decarboxylator comes in handy. It's a small, tube-like appliance, about the size of a water bottle, that precisely decarboxylates up to 14 grams of cannabis at a time. After about two hours, the weed is fully activated, which means you can bake with it, vape it, smoke it, or even directly eat it and get all of the possible THC out of it.

"Our average consumer says they are using about half as much product as they were using before," said Shanel Lindsay, the NOVA Decarboxylator inventor. "It gives them the ability to make anything in their home as a dispensary-grade edible. They can immediately eat it and it's an edible."

If you have a friend who makes a lot of homemade edibles, by buying them a NOVA Decarboxylator ($190 at ardentcannabis.com), you will be giving them the most important gift they never knew they needed.

A Book to Make You Weed-Smart

Grow Your Own is ostensibly a book about growing pot, but the 200-page guide is as much a primer to the world of cannabis as it is a step-by-step instructional. Still, more than half the book is dedicated to a beginner-friendly rundown of how to grow your own stash, from "Conceptualizing Your Garden" to growing, harvesting, and curing. If you're curious about home growing, this is a great way to get a taste of what it's like.

The book's authors, who also own and operate Olympia's Raven Grass farm, filled the rest of the book with illustrations and all the information you need to sound like you know what you're talking about when it comes to pot. From terpenes and cannabinoids to retail products, a reference book like this ($26.95, published by Tin House Books) is a great gift for both the weed-nervous newbie and the die-hard weed aficionado in your life.

Hella Nice Pot

This might seem like a lame gift idea—does someone who already buys a lot of pot need to get pot as a gift?—but hear me out. Regular tokers are almost always budget conscious, so find some higher-end product and you're guaranteed to make any stoner happy.

There's a big difference between budget pot and premium pot—top shelf bud tastes better, gives you a more interesting high, and is less likely to be grown with scary chemicals. Here's a short list of farms you can't go wrong with: Gold Leaf Gardens, Seattle Green Bud, Puffin Farm, West Coast Herbs, Western Cultured, Canna Organix, and House of Cultivar.

I recently came across a gram of House of Cultivar's Banana Split, and it temporarily transported me out of dreary, dark Seattle to a tropical paradise where ripe bananas get everyone high.

The Strongest Pot Product on Earth

Pot processors have been in a potency arms race against each other for centuries, trying to outdo each other with increasingly strong versions of hash, but the legal market has officially put this arms race to bed. Washington's legal weed market has achieved peak potency. As recently discussed in The Stranger, there's a new product on the legal market that is literally 100 percent THCA. It's so pure that it forms itself into a crystal.

This concentrate, called THCa Crystalline, delivers a whoppingly strong high when dabbed. Oleum Extracts is the biggest producer of crystalline in Washington and sells it as either just the pure pot crystals (they have no flavor whatsoever) or crystals dipped in different flavorful terpene blends. Crystalline retails for around $100 a gram.

If these pot crystals look a little too much like hard drugs to you, but there's a dabber on your list you'd like to treat to something nice, you can also opt for a tamer concentrate. Top-shelf concentrates are like fine whiskey—they're full of flavor, expensive, and wholly unique—so they make a great gift. You absolutely can't go wrong with concentrates from these brands: Terpco, Refine Seattle, and Polar Icetracts. Expect to spend at least $50 and easily up to $100 for a gram of gift-worthy concentrate.

Fancy Bongs

Stoners spend a lot of time with their paraphernalia, so upgrading a friend's pipe or bong is a gift that keeps on giving. Luckily for you, Washington is known around the world for our glass pipe makers.

The Northwest is where the modern glass pipe movement started, and Washington is home to many iconic artists who sell their smokeware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Local artists like PurpSkurp, Quave, Jake C. and Scott Deppe at Mothership, and Stormin Norman produce bongs that are internationally collected. If you're not trying to drop $10,000 on a new bong, but you would like to get someone some glass as a gift, consider heading to one of these head shops to find something affordable and locally made: Piece of Mind, Trichome, 52nd Glass Shop in Everett, or Hippie House in Tacoma.

If you want to find something one of a kind, head to Instagram, search the hashtag #pnwglass, and you'll find plenty of local artists hawking their glasswares.

The Fanciest Pot Cigar in the World

If you really want to get in a stoner's pants this holiday season, get them a Leira cannagar. It's a cigar that is wrapped with the leaves of a cannabis plant and filled with organic flower. They looked like a waste of money to me until I happened to try one. I was blown away.

Leira's cannagars smoke with the smoothest hits imaginable—a tiny baby with the pinkest of lungs could chief these without coughing (no, I did not just recommend buying a cannagar for your baby)—and they're designed to last for hours. I smoked mine with a group of about 10 people, and in the time that a joint would have been finished, the cannagar hardly looked smaller.

A cannagar would make the blunt lover in your life extremely happy, or it could make you the most popular guest at your next holiday party. With versions priced at $100, $420, and $3,600, it's probably the most expensive legal pot product in the state.