Ask HN: What practical skills do you recommend?

Growing your own outdoor crops. This will give you a stronger intuition for weather, the timing of the seasons, mindfulness around humidity (or lack thereof) etc.

It's relatively easy to be great at it: To make something taste great, you only need to learn sporadically over months (because restaurants cook in batches and are time/cost-sensitive). It's substantially easier to make something taste on par with professionals, compared to other skills like drawing.

You can do a lot of modifications and trade-offs to your liking - easily adjust things to your taste, lower the cost, be more healthy, or make the cooking process faster.

You can share with people you love. Invite friends to cook with you. And show off on social media though I rather not.

With that being said, just start simple, don't stockpile gadgets. It's more about skill and less about hardware. In Chinese cooking, a professional chef can cook hundreds of dishes with no more than five dirt-cheap cookwares.

2. Make a positive remark on how you'll use or enjoy the gift.

3. Say "thank you".

I only started learning hands on stuff in my late 30's when I moved rural. I'm getting better but still useless compared to my more capable neighbours and will hire people, occasionally to fix something I made worse, but still recommend.

My next project is to install a septic system during my Christmas holidays but I'll labour for a guy who knows what he is doing as dont want to get this one wrong first time around.