When I write one of our Many Bags of… features, I always find myself feeling one of two ways by the time I’m done: Either I walk away with a newfound respect for the personal style choices of the featured celebrity, or I’m barely containing an urge to punch her in the face for being tedious/pretentious/boring/what have you. Assembling these photos takes a lot of time, after all, and it can make you feel like you’ve gotten to know a celeb pretty well by the end.

I’ve had a serious girl-crush on Reese Witherspoon since I first watched Cruel Intentions. I fell in love with her and Ryan Phillippe in that movie and loved that they were a couple and started the perfect little family together. Reese and Ryan didn’t last, but Reese continues to be one of the leading ladies of Hollywood and is well-respected in the industry.

To tell you the truth, I’m not 100% clear on how Alexa Chung became the much-adored It Girl she is today. I guess that’s the thing with It Girls, though; they have a special magic to them that renders obsolete the linear, logical paths that most of us take to success. Alexa started out as a model in London, and her charisma quickly propelled her onto television as a presenter and host.

Happy day-before-Thanksgiving, Americans! Happy Wednesday, everybody else! Because Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday this (and every other) year, we won’t be having a new The Many Bags of… feature tomorrow. What we have for you today, though, is an easy cheat sheet for those of you who are new to our celebrity handbag lookbooks and want to catch up today instead of pretending to work before it’s time for a couple of days off.

I want you to think back, all the way back to when Real Housewives first appeared. It was just the Orange County wives back then, and the show was intended to be a behind-the-scenes look at the privileged lives of a group of women who lived in the exclusive Coto de Caza gated community. Now the show is more about drama than wealth, but the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills somehow manages to bring both in almost equal measure.

Let me be honest, I used to watch 7th Heaven. On Fridays in middle school, my teacher would sometimes put 7th Heaven on in lieu of, you know, actually teaching, and I got hooked. Any form of watching a movie or video in class was always a plus at that age, and 7th Heaven can’t be considered highly educational, so that only made my tweenage self happier.

In the interest of full disclosure: I’ve never seen a single movie that Emma Roberts has been in, and therefore I cannot pontificate on her merits as an actress. It’s not that I’ve avoided them, but Emma simply plays to an audience younger than I am. Tweens love her, but somehow she’s managed to make a great career for herself without being thought of as only a tween star.

Since we started putting together our The Many Bags of… series, we’ve had a few stars with stunning handbag collections and incredible fashion pedigrees on our list that we’ve been waiting for just the right time to profile. Well, today seemed as good a time as any to get that started, and who in Hollywood (or New York, where she lives) is more of an accessories icon than Sarah Jessica Parker?

If you follow along with horrible TV as closely as we do (and believe me, we follow it closely), you might know that perennial guilty pleasure Gossip Girl started its final season on Monday. I still haven’t caught up on last season, but when the whole mess finally makes it to Netflix, you can guarantee that I am going to spend lots of rainy evenings and weekends stuffing my head full of the Upper East Side travails of Blair and Serena.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is one of the few celebrities in the world who I think is so beautiful that I rarely notice her bag first when I look at her. Those lips! Those cheekbones! When you combine that with the fact that her boyfriend (and my imaginary boyfriend) Jason Statham is often in photos with her, it’s enough to distract even someone like me from handbags.