'Tis the season for holiday gift guides. You know, the ones that suggest 31 fish gifts for your fish-obsessed friends. They're everywhere this time of year, though nowhere quite as surprising as a seemingly run-of-the-mill office in Washington, D.C.

"I will candidly admit that when we started this a dozen years ago, I thought it was a fun thing to do," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a trade advocacy and lobbying group that works to strengthen manufacturing in the U.S. "It's just a break from talking about tariffs and policy and regulation. And so, the gift guide was kind of like a whimsical thing. It's grown into something much larger than that."

Unlike other holiday gift guides, theirs features only products made in America, from cowboy hat racks made in Wyoming, to giant stuffed animals from South Carolina. The list includes more than 150 companies from all 50 states.

• Made in America Holiday Gift Guide (from the Alliance for American Manufacturing)

And it's a very big deal for the companies included. "It can be very uplifting to some of these companies, because some are like, how did you find us?" Paul laughed. 

As a proud Marylander, Shelby Blondell dreamed of a better way to dig into the state's official unofficial cuisine. The result? The Sheller. Her small business, in a quiet Baltimore suburb, is a labor of love that is keeping manufacturing close to home.

"All along, I even had a lot of people when I was, you know, creating it saying like, 'You should just be making this overseas, you'll make so much more money,'" Blondell said. "And money's great. We need money to live. But you know, the cost of what that would've been didn't seem to outweigh kind of that value in my mind of wanting to have this be made here."

Value like partnering with a local fabricator that uses American steel, which means the Sheller has avoided the sting of recent tariffs. "If I would've been hit with tariffs of making this overseas somewhere right now, I don't know that I could still be in business," Blondell said.

This gift guide knows that your pets, of course, deserve stocking stuffers as well, and it suggests Cycle Dog in Portland, Oregon. For 16 years, founder Lynette Fidrych and her team have been recycling bicycle tire inner tubes to make leashes and collars. And yes, this collar does have a bottle opener. "Portland is known for biking, beer, sustainability, and dogs," Fidrych laughed.

A former Nike employee, Fidrych now employs about 30 workers at her Portland factory. "Made in America" means higher labor cost, and sometimes higher price tags. But to her, it also means higher quality. "We make a product and we put it in the dog run and have a hundred dogs play with it," she said. "And so, when we sell this toy, we're like, yeah, it's gonna last.

"Most people assume that plush toys are made in China, even my retailers," she said. "And I'm like, 'No, we hand-make these here in the U.S. There's a flag on the tag."

Meanwhile, back in D.C., Scott Paul is actually pretty easy to shop for: his shirt, made in New Jersey; his belt, made out of American leather; his shoes, from Meridian, Mississippi. 

For those of us still scrambling for a last-minute gift, Paul says to look close to home, and to start with the guide that brings not just holiday cheer, but maybe a little American pride.

"No one needs to say, 'Everything I have to own or buy has to be made in the United States'; that doesn't do anybody any favors, and it's really hard to pull off," he said. However, "If you can't find one thing that looks really cool and is also affordable on our gift guide, I would be shocked. Try it once, the odds are you're gonna come back and want more."

     
For more info:

• Made in America Holiday Gift Guide (from the Alliance for American Manufacturing)
• The Sheller
• Nick's Fish House, Baltimore
• Cycle Dog, Portland, Ore.

     
Story produced by David Rothman. Editor: Jason Schmidt.