Some last-minute gift suggestions

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If you’re like me — and hopefully, for your sake, you’re not — you may not be done with your Christmas gift shopping.

Or, in my case — and that of probably a significant number of other men — your Christmas gift buying.

See, I’m pretty well convinced most men don’t shop. Men tend to buy. If I need a new cap, for instance, and can’t get a feed company or tractor dealer to give me one, then I’ll go to my favorite store and see what they’ve got.

Then, when I see one I want, if I can afford it, I buy it. If I can’t, then I don’t.

Many women, on the other hand, go from one store to another, typically because they don’t want a hat with a feed company’s name on the front. They look first at one head covering and then another until they’ve about exhausted the town’s supply and the patience of the sales folks.

After that they’ll go back to the first store and purchase the first one they saw, unless, of course, some other lady has made it her own, in which case our heroine will weep and wail and stuff like that all the while chastising the store for not carrying what she wanted and never being willing to wear something someone else wears.

All of this reasoning, of course, results in two things: a generalization that doesn’t always come true and an observation that I may be in hot water eventually.

Having said all that, however, I still stand behind — or beside or even in front of — the core of that belief that men tend to buy rather than shop.

We guys tend to do other things, as well. Things like getting lost but not admitting it while we’re driving in a new place and don’t want to stop to ask for directions. Why should you stop and ask for directions since there are Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) everywhere telling us to turn left at the next road?

The fact I don’t have — or want — one of those gizmos has no meaning for my sense of direction; I’d rather read a map. It also helps that most of the time I don’t want to venture too far from Chatham County, like to Baltimore or other points. Given that I can still get from Moncure to Bonlee means I don’t have to have a GPS — or a road map.

I might add here that it was pointed out to me a few days ago that the Wise Men who traveled to Bethlehem that first Christmas also had a GPS — a Global Positioning Star. But that’s another story, although a good one.

Anyway, let me offer a few last-minute Christmas gift suggestions for your consideration. And I’m pretty sure everyone on your list could use and would want one or more and that there’s never a problem with size or color or anything like that.

One gift is the gift of encouragement. Speak to someone; tell them you appreciate them; tell them they are wonderfully gifted in some way because of the Spark of the Divine the Master Builder has built into them.

Another gift is the gift of the kind word. It’s been said a pat on the back is only a few inches removed from a kick in the seat of the pants, but miles ahead in results.

Here’s another I’m working on: the gift of listening. It’s becoming painfully obvious to me that there is a very good reason we have two ears and only one mouth. More than likely, it was intended for us to listen twice as much as we talk. I think I’m getting better at that one; I needed to. A friend called me the other day and as we worked through our conversation, I thought he needed something so I asked him if I could help him. All he said was, “I just wanted to talk with someone.”

Yet a fourth is to share what you have and not what you wish you had. I believe it’s written in a pretty good place, as Grantland Rice wrote, that “when the Master Scorer comes to write against your name, He’ll write not that you won or lost but how you played the game.”

I’m pretty sure that means we’ll be judged at the end of the game not on what we would have done if we’d had a million dollars but what we did with the $10 we did have.

Well, there are more, lots more, but that’s a good start. Thing of it is that you can put them and more in any number under your tree and still have room for other stuff like ugly ties and sweaters and yucky perfume.

And besides think of the money you’ll save not needing wrapping paper.

Happy shopping...