Without local shops, shoppers would buy gifts exclusively from in-flight catalogues, forcing fathers to sneak into airplane wheel wells on Black Friday to order spy camera blenders for their children. Enjoy earthbound browsing with today's Groupon: for $25, you get $50 worth of blown-glass art at Rosetree Blown Glass Studio on Vallette Street.

Bursting from the retro ambience of a refurbished art-deco movie theater, the renowned hand-blown-glass art studio boasts a multihued array of gaffer-made accoutrements. Keep wine from escaping on a post-party spree with a decorative bottlestopper ($62), a hand-crafted sculpture complete with elegant metal fitting designed to hold in liquid and libation secrets. Showcase seasonal candies or secret-admirer notes in a fluted dish ($65), available in intricate designs of blue, salmon, white, and more. The New Orleans paperweight adds personality to desks and gravity to astronaut homework with the classic Big Easy fleur de lis etched in a heart shape atop a round paper anchor ($50). For a romantic shimmer, check out the pointed oil candle with a stand, a teardrop-shaped candle perched in a three-pronged mini-tripod that imbues romance with long-lasting light ($50), similar to a triple showing of Gremlins under an Alaskan summer sky.

Rosetree's products outfit the contemporary-crafts section of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the glass house also sells its inimitable items to more than 350 galleries, stores, and itinerant, vaseless flowers country-wide.