‘Tis the time to think up presents to give that don’t amount to throwing money at guilt. I actually have gotten to the place where I don’t make attempts at giving all my friends and relatives useless presents. I leave that to my wife and file my guilty feelings with those from years where I don’t make donations to public radio and TV. I try, the rest of the year, to remember to give things to those people when I see something I guess they might really like, or more often, which I think I would like them to have. But back to the presents quandary.
If I were to make a list of what I would judge to be satisfactory presents over the past 50 years, almost all of them would fall in two categories which seen to have in common only the amount of time they use up on Christmas Day. The first, though less admirable, is puzzles.
I am addicted to the kind of mechanical puzzles one might find at BitsandPieces.com as well as your local puzzle store. I both give them out at this time of the year and also receive them. I've got hundreds by now. There are many ranging from Tavern Puzzles (Tucker Jones House, Inc.) which are metal, to all sorts of wooden things (good ones can be found by Channel Craft, Charleroi, Pa.). There are some devilishly good ones from Belgum these days. (Eureka BVBA). The cost goes from $0.00 for the ones I make out of pencils and string, to hundreds of dollars for wooden boxes with cleverly concealed sliding panels. My favorite is a pencil and string thing that can be applied to the button hole of the recipient in seconds. My father used to go to engineering society meetings with a bunch of these and put them on suit coats (Westinghouse pencils, in this case) and my mother said that she would see the recipients weeks later with them still on their coats to proud to cut them off.
There are several different kinds of puzzles or rather solutions to them that are applied in many ways. After you have done them for a while, you may recognize the solution though the embodiment can be wildly different. Many people these days like video games and arcade games like pinball but they have never interested me though I don’t know why.
The second kind of gift I like best is books. The thicker the better.
It might be great (for me) if a list of your recent favorites were to show up here (If they haven’t already). I find myself interested in what many of you have to say and therefore guess that I would be interested in your favorite books. The ones that I have enjoyed recently, though not necessarily new are:
Harry S. Truman, Margaret Truman
An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
The Goldbug Variations or anything by Richard Powers
The Sybil, Barabas or anything by Par Lagerkvist –
Basket Case or anything by Carl Hiaasen
State of Denial, Woodward
The Conservative Nanny State, Dean Baker (free online)
Betrayed, Brendan DuBois
What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis
In the Shadow of the Prophet, Milton Viorst
Patrick O’Brien – the rest of the Master and Commander series
(Whoopee, some 20 books)
The Problem of Pain or others by C.S. Lewis
What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis
Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is really neat that many of these old saws are available for next to nothing on Amazon.com as used books. I had given or lent many of my favorites and have been able to replace them for almost nothing – to give away again. Too bad Amazon is a mostly red company.