Holiday Gifts With Soul - NYTimes.com MY 7-year-old daughter, Shan, was glued to an "iCarly" marathon on a recent morning, slow to mute the TV during commercials, as her father has ordered. Instead, she chimed in with the pitches, repeating three little words, nine little letters, that every parent dreads, especially at holiday time. I want that. Immediate action was called for. Like the Ghost of Christmas Future leading Scrooge by the chains, I took her to a garage sale. The message I intended was: "Behold the fate of the Stompeez animal slippers you demand, child! This winter you may be tucking your little feet into their synthetic lining. But they'll be in a pile of rejected possessions before you've outgrown them. That was lost on Shan, who fell in love with a battered foosball table and a jar of jeweled straight pins. And who knows? Maybe the Stompeez my fickle daughter longs for will be snapped up by another child from a future pile of worn merchandise. Garage-sale items are vessels with emotions pouring in and out: their attractions diminish for their owners, yet accrue to strangers. A previous owner may scorn the loss of freshness, while a new one celebrates the layers of patina. But objects don't have to be pre-owned to give you the feeling that they're possessed. This holiday season shows designers putting spirit into household goods by evoking fleeting moments, fragile materials and old memories. They're capturing the security of the primal campfire with an LED lamp that flickers like a candle (Ingo Maurer and Moritz Waldemeyer; $500), and conjuring childhood behavior with wallpaper that looks as if it's been scrawled on with a ballpoint pen (Alissia Melka-Teichroew for Rollout; $10 per square foot). They're preserving their tourist photos in white marble tile (Peggy Wong for Clé; $120 to $275) and bringing a singular, un-frat-house style to foosball (Fredericks & Mae; $190). These goods all stand out because of their sensory and emotional dimensions - in a word, their soul. But what is it, exactly, that gives an object soul? I put it directly to the designers. For Kiki van Eijk in the Netherlands, surprise is the animating force. Several years ago, she saw a hinged sewing box at a flea market in Paris and vowed to build a piece of furniture that sprang open the same way. Ms. van Eijk, whose grandmother was a seamstress, said she wanted the cabinet to have the intimacy of hidden nooks and the warmth of domestic craft. She also wanted to be able to unfold it with a pinkie, a feat she finally brought off after many consultations with engineers. "It should be a miracle," she said, or at least feel like one. Miracles don't come cheap; the cabinet sells for about $54,000. For the artist Lauren DiCioccio, a soulful object is one that touches you every day, even if it's as despised as the generic white plastic sack that has been accused of destroying the planet. When San Francisco issued its first ordinance to ban plastic shopping bags five years ago, Ms. DiCioccio, who was living in the Bay Area at the time, reproduced the outcasts as embroidered cloth sculptures. Now she has created a functional version in taffeta with her Thank You, Thank You tote ($35). "Even though the bags are terrible for the environment and wasteful and kind of silly, they are still so familiar to us," she said. These disposable objects are as dear to us as hand-me-down jewelry from our great-grandparents, just because they surround us every day. Jonathan Legge, a founder of the online design boutique Makers & Brothers, said that the spirit of an object comes largely from its material, "how it functions and wears over time." The cutting boards he sells, for example, are made of Irish beech harvested from fallen trees (starting at about $36). They are beautiful, but so simple you might not think a narrative could be attached to them. You would be wrong. Mr. Legge, who lives in Dublin, got the idea for angling the edges from a slab of timber he found in a Dumpster. Actually, he used the word "skip" instead of "Dumpster," so it took a reporter awhile to understand why his girlfriend didn't want him to bring the slab home. "I bleached it and scrubbed it up so it was clean," Mr. Legge said of his prototype. I served some meals on it and started using it as a chopping board. The boards Mr. Legge is selling have a more sanitary provenance. Anyway, beech, he pointed out, has natural antibacterial qualities. And what could be more soulful than a tree?