Holiday greetings to you all! I am thrilled to return, once again, for an updated version of our annual gift giving guide. If you have a Damian Lewis fan in your life, this post is for YOU!
I am a burlesque performer, who specializes in holiday-themed acts. Being known as the “Queen of Christmas”, I love merging my two worlds and bringing my love of the holiday season AND my love of all things Damian into one fun post. This year is a little different than most, because live entertainment just isn’t safe yet. I’m still staying busy and finding ways to live my best holiday life!
And as always, here are some of our tried and true gift giving favorites, and some new picks-enjoy!!
Television and Films available on DVD:
The first stop on our list has to be the several wonderful choices in DVD releases that you could choose.
You can find both older and newer releases at most major online retailers like Amazon.com. They have everything from the big screen down to the small! You could go for this beautiful Band of Brothers DVD Collection, or a small release film like The Silent Storm. With DVDs, you can span almost the entire spectrum of his career, watching Damian grow from a talented young man playing the heroic Dick Winters, all the way to a mature, seasoned and experienced actor portraying the overbearing and abusive Balor McNeil. It’s the best kind of “time travel”, in my opinion!
All sorts of excellent collections of TV seasons are also available, such as seasons 1-4 of the show that got this whole blog rolling, Homeland, to our most recent obsession, Billions! Make sure you are ready for a quarantine binge with seasons one, two, three and four!
You can even relive our lively summer from a few years back with Charlie Crews if you’d pick up Seasons 1 and 2 of Life on DVD!
source: NBC
In the first guide we published I was all about Wolf Hall, released by PBS, which is still a great choice. And last year I wanted to shine a spotlight on Forsyte Saga, which I promised to watch in 2018 and 2019, and apparently not even a 4 month furlough gave me enough time to fit this into my 2020!! I think I’ve put off watching this long enough to make it a running bit on the blog now! Will I return next year, having watched this? We will see!
source: Amazon
Last year we were still waiting for our first glimpse of Damian as the iconic Steve McQueen, but this year we can watch it for ourselves in the comfort of our own home! Snag this awesome collectors edition DVD and repeatedly watch the best 5 minutes in the whole film!
Books:
If you loved Band of Brothers and Wolf Hall, maybe you’d love to take a deeper dive into the books that inspired these great shows? A quick stroll through your local bookseller, or a bigger chain like Barnes and Noble, and you can find the novels of both stories! Both “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the bodies.” If you are anything like me, you’ve probably been excited to consume all I could find out about the history of Henry, Thomas, Anne and the time they ruled during. I love the way that fandom can light a fire within, and suddenly you are on this quest to educate yourself and gain new knowledge. I have Damian to thank for my new found appreciation of some pretty iconic parts of English history! The third volume in the Wolf Hall series is out and Damianista swears by it! We hope that Damian will bring Henry VIII to life once again in the BBC adaptation of “The Mirror and The Light.”
You could also pick up the book “A Spy Among Friends”, which Damian’s next limited series project will be based on!
Speaking of our Damian fandom, we cannot have a section on books without including “Meeting Damian Lewis”, a fun little bit of life-meets-fan-fiction that we featured previously on the blog. Thank you, Christine Wilson! I think of you as an honorary member of the sisterhood 🙂
New to the list this year is a children’s book by Sharmila Collins of Cure EB-the charity that Damian is a patron for.
“Binkle can’t wait until he turns from caterpillar to butterfly. He’ll finally have strong, beautiful wings to take him high into the sky! But when the day comes, something is terribly wrong. Why are Binkle’s wings so wispy and weak? How will he ever fly like the other butterflies if his wings are nothing like theirs? Yet with some help and creativity, maybe there’s more than one way to fly . . .”
Officially Licensed Show Merchandise:
This is the part where I, as an artist, have to pull out my soapbox. Please, please, please, as we partake in our fandom and enjoy our shows, do what you can to support official, licensed show merchandise. These shows are created by hard working actors, writers, directors and crew, so respect their intellectual property. In supporting the “real deal”, you in turn support them. There, now we can get on to the goodies!! 😀
Showtime, of course, has a great supply of Billions merchandise. Everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs to Christmas sweaters!!
Warning, though, if you buy any of the “F*ck you money” merch…..there’s no censoring in the final product!
And in a big sign of these unique times, there’s this nifty tool:
I have something a lot like this on my keychain, and use it every day to keep my hands away from dirty doorknobs. It is must have for this moment in our lives!
So that’s the list for this year, folks! I hope you can find all the fun gifts for yourself or the Damian fan in your life. And don’t forget-all year long, you can find an assortment of our favorite items under the shop section on Damian-lewis.com! What are your favorite items? Join us in the comments to chat about what we hope to find under our trees on Christmas morning!
Happy Hollie-days!!
Love, Holliedazzle and the whole Fan Fun with Damian Lewis Crew