My favorite friend came back from a business trip with a mad stack of expensive, imported men’s mags for me. My favorite was the British-based BUCK.

I find the majority of higher-priced men’s mags rather irrelevant to my life. Waifs with chin-length bangs, shirtless on sand-dunes, slinking around in seven-hundred-dollar cigarette jeans just does not dial anywhere near my frequencies.

BUCK chucks away with all that junk and instead offers pages upon pages of street-style standouts, low-cost covetables, sartorial showcases of pseudo-celebs, and even retro-tinged recipes.

If I still lived across the pond I’d be certainly swapping pounds for BUCKS month after month.

It was December 22nd, and I’d just visited the Ohio Knitting Mills website for the very first time. Their offering of deadstock sweaters from 1947-74 were just what I’d hoped for: vivid, vibrant windows into the fashions of the past. The truncated waists, the short-sleeve cuts, the glassy-glossy buttons…every piece offered on the site seemed lifted from the dressing room of a Bing Crosby musical. In no time I knew my own winter wardrobe would be needing just such a blast of Bing-y coziness.

But the bold blue cardigan which had become my favorite offering on the OKM site was nearly $150, and with Christmas just three days away, the old “Tis the season of giving not receiving” guilt threatened to thwart my Crosby-colored dreams.

Worse yet, I had already gifted myself with the Lomo LC-A camera for the holidays, so I couldn’t even use that guise as my excuse. It took but a minute though for me to twist my mid-January birthday into a perfectly legitimate opportunity to buy myself a knitted treat a few weeks early.

Within a half hour of ordering my birthday cardigan, a Steven from OKM rang me up, kindly concerned if my order was a gift that needed to arrive instantly for Christmas. I assured him it wasn’t, no need to rush the delivery, after which Steven excitedly described how the sweater I’d ordered was the same variety Mr. Rogers was often supplied with. Awesome to know, and awesome of Steven to provide such great customer service at every step!

When my birthday present to myself arrived, I was concerned I had been sent the wrong sweater. On-line the cardigan had appeared so electrically blue, but the sweater sitting in my box was more subdued in its saturation. More of a cornflower blue, like a Perry Ellis golf sweater from 1992. I wasn’t digging it like I had dreamed and, for $150, I felt I needed to return it.

But those darn glossy buttons reminded me of a sweater my German grandma had knit for me as a youngster back in the 70s. So I decided-to-decide that the outdated-ness of the yarn’s blue made the sweater more evidently vintage and rare-seeming, not just something I fell into at The Gap two winters ago. I knew I had it in me to give the sweater a safe and loving home, after all.

The exact shade of this much-debated blue never quite registers accurately in any of the photos I’m presenting here, so trust my written descriptions if you’ve become confused. And though I had originally wished my sweater would seem more Life Aquatic-like in its coloring for when I’d pair it up with my recently-acquired red cap, I think my Team Zissou homage will pop just perfectly.

You’re welcome, me.

It’s not something I’ve done before, but this year I did gift myself a Christmas Present.

Some of us hunt for the ultimate denim jeans, or the perfect pair of trainers – filling our lives with formidable contenders but somehow never meeting up with that one true champion.

I’m becoming that way with cameras. The cover story from this issue of Monocle magazine last spring put many of my personal feelings into perfect focus – that the output of digital cameras never seems to glow with the rich warmth of that from old-school film cameras.

Digital vs. analog, flash vs. non-flash, clarity vs. surrealism, my camera-oriented allegiances have wavered and ruptured violently over the years. My office closet is now littered with the sad corpses of cameras I wanted desperately to rescue me from myself but that never quite did.

So this December, my best guess for what might finally end this camera-based turmoil turned out to be the Lomo LC-A, a 35mm device some consider a “toy camera”. From glowing descriptions and photographic examples, I began to trust that if armed with such a camera myself, every image I captured from then on would appear as if snipped out of some vibrant Steve Zissou-like scrapbook.

Being that the LC-A in its peak form and specs is now out of production, I bopped over to e-bay and ordered a slightly vintage, mint-in-box device from St. Petersberg, Russia.

24 days later, and a full week after Christmas, my lustworthy Lomo arrived via air-mail. I’ve mooned over every layer of the box and tape, paper, string and packaging that it arrived in.

I’m smitten as well with the way it looks, how the name-brand is printed in Russian rather than English lettering (butches it up a bit, I feel), and I appreciate the rock-like sturdiness the device suggests when I grab it in my hands.

I need now to take a test roll to determine whether I can salute the camera’s actual photographic capabilities, or if the LC-A is destined to die in the closet with the previous generations of fallen contenders.

Please, please, please…let this be the one!