Gift Guide … Not for profit

Published 1:02 am Saturday, November 22, 2014

Suffolk has a great selection of boutique retailers where you can find just the perfect — and unique — gift for everyone on your Christmas list.

But there are a few places in town where your gift budget makes a real difference: the retail outlets at three of the city’s top nonprofit organizations.

At the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, folks can visit Jester’s Gallery Shop for an eclectic selection of original art, including a regularly rotating collection from a featured artist, sometimes even one from Suffolk. Don’t leave the building without taking a look through the Center’s galleries, and be sure to get a schedule of upcoming events.

Email newsletter signup

At Riddick’s Folly, visitors can tour the massive Greek Revival home built by Mills Riddick in 1837, they can see one of Suffolk’s finest collections of Civil War artifacts, they can immerse themselves in the history of 19th-century Suffolk — and they can spend a few minutes in the tastefully stocked little gift shop in the home’s English basement.

And at the Suffolk Seaboard Station Railroad Museum, visitors can enjoy a two-room model train layout that is also a scale model of the original city of Suffolk or they can get up close and personal with a real train caboose. And there’s no place around with a better selection of train and railroad memorabilia for purchase. Best of all, proceeds benefit the Suffolk-Nansemond Historical Society, which operates the museum.