Perhaps I’m suffering from a lingering post-Thanksgiving food coma, but the bean bag chair has been looking pretty good as a preferred piece of furniture. It’s the ultimate lounge act, its unstructured form invitingly enveloping, the perfect physical expression of the unstructured time of holidays and vacation. If only...!

Winter holidays may not be quite so luxurious, but the presence of a bean bag chair will certainly make your moments of down time more relaxing. 

The bean bag chair is, in its own relaxed way, a modern classic, dating back to the groovy 1960s in Italy. Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini, and Franco Teodoro designed the "Sacco" out of leather, filled with plastic beads that conformed to the body, in 1969. Many a family den or college dorm room has boasted a bean bag chair in the decades since.

Jaxx Bean Bags, out of Atlanta, has revived the classic, with a full line of bean bag chairs for indoors and outdoors, adults and children, singles and couples. (Fab has a limited number of them at a discount this week, until Sunday.) 

Jaxx even offers a denim collection, the fabric sourced from the classic American textile company Cone denim out of Greensboro, NC. All of Jaxx's bean bags are American made, in the traditional furniture-making southeast of our United States (adding a whif of country living to your bean bag...). The denim chairs come with a carrying handle. 

For those who prefer a more solid, upstanding blob of furniture, there are leather ottomans available at Schoolhouse Electric, in lounge-worthy large or footstool small. Of course, these pieces are an entirely different animal from the amorphous bean bag chair, but it's hard not to think that the bean bag owes something to the ottoman, also commonly called a "pouf."

Schoolhouse Electric's multi-tasking footstool/chair/home decor accent is available in several colors of fabric or rich leather, including the pumpkin orange leather pictured here.