10 Man Christmas Gift Ideas

Finding the right gift for my dad, fathers-in-law, brothers and brothers-in-law is always a little challenging for me. These guys don't ask for much. As a group, they are pretty content. They work hard and if they get an idea for something they want, they figure out a way to get it. When I finally think I've got their styles down, they change their whole look. I'm serious! And if I even dared to venture into the world of gadgets, I am sure to pick out the ones they'll never use.

4. Cure for Memory Loss - If there is an item he is always losing, get him one for every room of the house...and the car, if need be! For instance, guitar picks (that would be for my husband), pairs of scissors, nail clippers, slippers, tools, vitamins, ...you get the idea.8. Relaxation at Its Best - There isn't a guy I know who wouldn't want a really comfortable recliner. You can find sales on new ones all the time or if you really need to save, check out the classified ads in your newspaper or some good local used furniture stores. The ones I like to visit regularly have nice recliners at very discounted prices. Whatever you do, sit in the chair before you buy it. Some are more comfortable than others.3. Memory Film - Collect slides, photos or video footage of him as a child on one video or DVD. Put it together yourself using a home editing program, order a package deal from a reputable editing company or hire someone you know to do it for you. Add his favorite music as the background sound.10. One Man's Treasure - What does this guy collect and treasure? Make him a display or collage to put up in his office, garage or room. You may need a shelf to hold things, a board to pin items to, a scrapbook, or a closed cabinet to protect his collection. If you can't think of anything he collects, it may be that he is like my dad, who treasures his friends more than any of his "stuff". He would enjoy a framed collage with photos of his hundreds of friends.1. T-shirt With a Funny Saying - Look online for a company that specializes in unique shirts or create your own with fabric paints or markers. You can put a joke with the first line on the front of the t-shirt and the punch line on the back OR you can find humorous quotes from one of this man's favorite authors, politicians or celebrities. One idea is to take a solid colored t-shirt and put a big gold star on it that says, "TV Sheriff" with the words "REMOTE CONTROL" on the pocket. Whatever saying you choose, make him extra happy by getting the right size t-shirt. My husband is a smaller guy who really appreciates a shirt that fits him properly, after receiving many that could fit two of him! Don't forget that 100% cotton will shrink some the first time it is washed.Well here are ten man holiday gift ideas I have found that almost any guy would like. Quite a few are humorous, maybe because my favorite thing to do for all these hard working men, is lighten them up.6. Night of Laughs - Order him a new or used DVD of his favorite comedian doing a stand up routine. Give him tickets to a local comedy club. Download hilarious clips from the internet, creating your own collection. Whatever you do, make him laugh.2. Rare Indoor Plant - Where I see caring for plants as a chore, many guys I know look at it as an art form. My brother-in-law collects bonsai trees, carefully working them into the shape he plans. He shows us pictures of miniature oaks and maples with the button sized leaves turning gold and red in the fall. My husband enjoys miniature cactus and has kept one growing in a tiny cup of sand since we got married almost ten years ago. Read up on plants that would match with your guy's lifestyle, decor or interests. Consider a plant from his favorite country or one mentioned in a book or movie he likes.9. Special Delivery - Find a toy truck he would like - dumptruck, low rider, antique pickup - at a toy store or antique store. Fill the bed of the truck with all his favorite goodies such as candy bars, homemade cookies, caramels, etc. If you really want to surprise him, hide a gift certificate underneath all the treats.

10. One Man's Treasure - What does this guy collect and treasure? Make him a display or collage to put up in his office, garage or room. You may need a shelf to hold things, a board to pin items to, a scrapbook, or a closed cabinet to protect his collection. If you can't think of anything he collects, it may be that he is like my dad, who treasures his friends more than any of his "stuff". He would enjoy a framed collage with photos of his hundreds of friends.

Thanksgiving Gift Ideas

Most people I know don't expect a gift in the fall. That's what makes a Thanksgiving gift idea so much fun. I don't have to get anything expensive. I don't have to search for the "perfect" gift. I simply have fun putting together a hostess gift or fall holiday gift basket. Its a way I like to say thank you to my friends and family and celebrate the coming cold weather - we've got to celebrate it or else we'll mourn it!

Fall Scene Puzzle to Work on After DinnerCouple Dozen Fresh or Mail Ordered Tamales OR Other Prepared Ethnic Food for a Day After Thanksgiving FeastNew Ornament, Lights, or Other Holiday Decoration plus a Commitment that You Will Come Help Decorate for an Hour or TwoCeramic Pumpkin Dish (with lid) OR Fall Themed Tin Filled with Dried CranberriesThanksgiving Cactus (which blooms in November, not to be confused with the Christmas Cactus which blooms in December)With all the other holiday expenses on the way, I don't want to spend more than ten or twenty dollars on a Thanksgiving gift idea. Better yet, I like free gifts I can make or put together myself. These are all my favorites:Have a very happy Thanksgiving!Pumpkin Spice Bread MixSupplies For a Letter Box Hunt Including Stamp, Ink Pad, Notepad and Directions for a Local Hunt (Find out more about letterboxing at www.letterboxing.org . My children love this treasure hunt activity. I love the exercise we get while doing it.)Plan ahead for an activity Thanksgiving gift idea to draw family and friends together and create your own traditions:Party Music - Buy new OR create a custom mixture tape or CD at home.Wreath for Door OR Table Center PieceNutcracker and Bag of NutsSmall Booklet or Scrapbook Titled "Things I Love About My Family" - Pass it around for everyone to write in.Framed Fall Themed Photo of You or Your Family - Years ago, my mom and dad got all seven of my siblings and me to dress in jeans and flannel shirts and took us to the Oklahoma Ouchita mountains for a photo shoot. The photographer? My future husband! And boy, did he take some nice pictures. You might also use a photo from a past Thanksgiving gathering.A Scavenger Hunt List with a prize for the Winning Team or PersonSeasonal CookbookLight Solid Colored Table Cloth and Fabric Markers - Have family and friends write on the tablecloth what they are thankful for, along with a signature and date. Make it a yearly tradition to add thank-you's to the tablecloth.Use these personal Thanksgiving gift ideas for friends and co-workers who need to know that you are thankful to be apart of their lives:Memory Jar - Cut colored paper into small pieces. Using just a few words, write on each one a memory of an experience you had with the recipient that you are thankful for. Keep your memories short so you have time to think of dozens.Jar of Gourmet Cranberry Relish or Apple ButterIf you are invited to dinner, bring a quick and easy gift for the cook or the other guests:An Apron - There are pretty aprons, funny aprons, white chef aprons. Take your pick.Holiday Organizer Notebook - You can buy one or put it together yourself with an ordinary spiral notebook, scrapbook or wrapping paper, stickers and headings like: Winter Calandar, Work/School Gift List, Family Gift List, Friends Gift List, Holiday Meal Planning, Events/PartiesSample of One of Your Favorite Holiday Dishes plus a Hand Written Copy of the Recipe - When I give a recipe as a Gift, I like to include a little story or memory about that recipe.Board Game for Those Uninterested in Sports (like me!)

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!

Deserts and limitations: lessons from prehistoric desert dwellers

Living in the desert is challenging. We spent the week after Christmas in Baja, California, camping on the beach. Fortunately, our tents were comfortable and meals were cooked for us. But Pedro, a Baja native, gave us a glimpse into a very different past.

The afternoon was cool with sun shining through broken clouds and a rare rain in the offing. As we climbed up the steep, rock-strewn path we were careful to watch our step. Although vegetation is sparse, most of the plants wear spines or thorns for protection. A little stumble could result in a painful jab. Despite their armor, many desert plants are edible. Pedro assured us that the common prickly-pear cactus fruit tastes good, and even the pads are edible--after removing the spines.European missionaries recorded that the indigenous peoples were hungry except during the brief pitahaya season--perhaps wishful thinking on the Europeans' part. Lacking any means of preserving fruit, how could people prolong this short season of plenty? Baja natives came up with an unlikely solution.Every living system has limits to the number of plants or animals it can sustain. Biologists call it "carrying capacity"--the number of plants, animals or people that an area can support given the quality of the natural environment. Ingenuity can extend the environment's ability to support people, but not forever. We are subject to biological and other limits.When a habitat's carrying capacity is exceeded, it becomes degraded and the population will be forced to decrease. Carrying capacity in the desert is dictated by the supply of water. Many people think that the ultimate limitation here in the arid Southwest will be water, just as it was for the Pericu.On top of the mesa we found their summer home. There was little to mark it except for another heap of shells and four round depressions in the rock. Grinding holes, Pedro commented. He then explained that there is a type of manna--the pitahaya fruit--that ripens in late summer. It grows on the organ pipe cactus (pitahaya dulce) that resembles a clump of spiny fingers pointing skyward. The size of a tennis ball, pitahaya fruit has the color and a bit of the flavor of watermelon. Although rich in energy, the tiny seeds pass through without being digested.We reached a cave that had been the winter home for a band of Pericu people, the extinct indigenous tribe of southern Baja. A small red ochre pictograph decorated the cave. We imagined a dozen people huddled in the chill admonishing their toddlers to stay away from the edge. A pile of shells lay below, showing that the Pericu enjoyed the ocean's bounty.Baja, California is a desert peninsula: the sun is brilliant, the growing season long and vacant land plentiful. What is lacking is enough fresh water. Not much grows with only five inches of rain a year. Without plentiful seafood this place could not support humans.We have exploited the resources of our planet for so long, and found so many ingenious ways to increase its productivity, that we often forget about limits. The desert reminds us of the finiteness of biological systems.Planting seeds and controlling water are two of the first steps to growing crops. Agriculture freed people from spending so much time producing food, and eventually led to our abundant lives. We must not lose track of our dependence on water, however, nor forget that the earth can support only a finite number of people.The indigenous people developed a system to harvest the nutrition in pitahaya seeds that disgusted missionaries. While enjoying the abundance of the harvest, people collected their poop in special places. When it had dried, the seeds were separated, washed, and then pulverized in those circular rock depressions. After grinding they make an edible paste high in fat. Their "recycling" of calorie-rich pitahaya seeds illustrates how desperate they must have been to get enough nutrition.Humans are cleverer than most animals in cultivating nature. There is no evidence that the Pericu had formal agriculture. Nevertheless, some seeds must have escaped from the pitahaya gatherers and landed near their habitations, thus increasing future harvests. Accidental seeding may have been one of the ways that agriculture got started in other parts of the world.

RICHARD GROSSMAN is an obstetrician-gynecologist who has been helping women plan their families for over 30 years. He chose this medical specialty because of concern about human population growth, and can be reached at richard@population-matters.org.

Best Of The Bunch

Christmas cactus They provide a burst of vivid colour and a touch of the tropics to windowsills during the worst of the winter weather, with flowers emerging from their branching and a rc h i n g stems. Leave them alone, watering occasionally, don''t turn the plants on your windowsill or the buds may drop. Also, avoid putting them in draughts or cold temperatures - keeping hybrids above 15C (59F) to hold their colour.

The Schlumbergera truncata, its technical name, comes in shades of white, pink, red and purple and is generally bought from garden centres in bud and blooms between mid November and late January - depending on the variety. For good flowering provide long nights of uninterrupted darkness - which means no artificial light - in autumn. Just before flowering, the plants should be kept cool and dryish until the flower buds form.

Out of it

It must be hard work looking after a minimalist home - never forgetting to hide away the paperback you've just put down, keeping every surface spotless. But they come into their own this week. While most rural families face spending hours, if not days, packing away cribs and ancient pieces of tinsel, the minimalist home-owner just has to take down the one or two baubles he has hanging from his cactus and deposit them in the bin.

Indoor cyclamen can survive from year to year if you remember to water at the base. Otherwise a pool of water gathers in the concave top of the corms and causes them to rot. You should also keep removing dead flowers and mouldering stems. Stop watering around April, store the pots upright or on their sides, anywhere convenient - under a greenhouse bench is a good place - and leave them to dry out. Bring them in again in the autumn, re-pot if you like, start watering and give them the occasional light feed.The flowers are in fact quite insignificant and it is the bracts or, roughly speaking, top leaves that give the bright red, pink or cream colour. This has been fostered by imitating a Mexican mountain and keeping the plant in the dark for eight weeks for 14 hours a day and in bright sunlight for the other ten, all at a temperature of exactly 68F. On top of that, poinsettias are deciduous so, love them as you will, once the bracts get brassed off, all that's left is a stalky mess. Try the light and dark regime next autumn if you must but it's probably cheaper to bung the poinsettias in the bucket and buy another next Christmas. Cheaper still: buy an artificial one. It will last forever and no one will ever know the differenceShe asks: My Easter flowering cactus looks fabulous at the moment and all my friends have asked if they can have a cutting. How do I go about it?Besides, doesn't ganja make people paranoid? I wouldn't want to find Peter shivering in a corner, gibbering that Ken Livingstone had come to get him. He's almost at that stage without the benefit of drugs, and I'm hoping our holiday in Barbados will distract him from thoughts of what the rest of the year may hold.For while the festive season may be over when we return to country life, the open season on those who enjoy it will have begun anew, We are just clutter in New Labour's fashion-conscious, urban home.

For while the festive season may be over when we return to country life, the open season on those who enjoy it will have begun anew, We are just clutter in New Labour's fashion-conscious, urban home.

Author: de Lisle, Leanda

Blooming gifts

With a little love, affection and prudent watering, your Christmas plants can last throughout the year, says Sean Hignett Christmas pot- plants are not really intended to outlast the festive season, otherwise nurserymen would be out of business. But with a little care you can take those green gifts and make them last throughout the year.

Azaleas, like cyclamen, should already be in a cool but frost- free place where they should be well watered without drowning until flowering is over. They should then be re-potted - remember that azaleas are acid lovers so the compost must be lime-free - and pruned if they are looking straggly. Thereafter give them a weekly feed and when the chance of frost is past, stand the pots outside in a semi- shaded place. I find it less trouble to plant them directly in the ground, either still in their pots or out, then you needn't worry about watering. Don't expect them to bloom again for Christmas though. By then they'll be following nature's calendar and may not bloom until the following spring.A plant whose natural calendar has been distorted in spades is the poinsettia (euphorbia pulcherrima) or Christmas Flame Flower. In their natural state, in the mountains of Mexico, poinsettias are trees rather than pot plants and so far as keeping them going until next Christmas is concerned, the answer is simple: forget about it.Drugging the children would deprive them of the memories that are the entire point of this holiday. But drugging the adults could be an idea. A little ganja for my husband might help us both relax. I hear other Masters of Foxhounds are very taken with the weed. A friend who went to dinner at the house of one MFH told me that great fat joints were passed round with the port. I wonder what after dinner games they played? 'Run the pink elephant to ground', 'Hunt the savouries' and 'Sleep under the furniture'? Thinking about it, a ganja-smoking father wouldn't be a pretty sight.You'll probably find kalanchoe blossfeldiana bearing a recently invented 'popular' name on its label, but if you've been given a thing with glossy leaves and lots of tiny red or pink flowers, that's it. Despite the fact that its home territory is Madagascar, kalanchoe is even easier to care for. Simply re-pot in the spring, keep adequately watered and it should also flower again next Christmas.I can't imagine many things nicer than disappearing from England for a week and then returning to find that all the festive fun is over. But perhaps disappearing without six children would be one of them. It's not that I don't enjoy being with my children, or that my nephews and niece aren't perfectly charming, it's just that large family occasions are exhausting enough when they are only a few hours long. I need hardly spell out the kind of stress we may have to endure over the course of the next few days. How will we keep on an even keel? I'm going to spend a lot of time being massaged by beach boys, whatever anyone else plans to do.

The flowers are in fact quite insignificant and it is the bracts or, roughly speaking, top leaves that give the bright red, pink or cream colour. This has been fostered by imitating a Mexican mountain and keeping the plant in the dark for eight weeks for 14 hours a day and in bright sunlight for the other ten, all at a temperature of exactly 68F. On top of that, poinsettias are deciduous so, love them as you will, once the bracts get brassed off, all that's left is a stalky mess. Try the light and dark regime next autumn if you must but it's probably cheaper to bung the poinsettias in the bucket and buy another next Christmas. Cheaper still: buy an artificial one. It will last forever and no one will ever know the difference

Author: Sean Hignett

GARDENING : Q & A

THIS week's star letter is from Denise Howard of Leeds, who wins pounds 20 worth of National Garden Gift Tokens.

ADRIENNE SAYS: Chrysanthemums need to be kept in a cool, frost- free place so that the plants harden off ready for planting out in late May. Keep the plants watered and watch out for greenfly. To make it bushier with plenty of flowers, pinch out the growing tip to stimulate dormant side-shoots into action. Before planting outside, prepare the soil by digging in plenty of well-rotted manure or garden compost, and rake in a handful of Growmore fertiliser per sq m.I don't suppose, however, I'll be able to evade this week's responsibilities altogether. Among them will be trying to prevent the children from making too much noise around the resort's pool. Loud games amidst slumbering strangers make my husband very anxious, so I have to look as if I'm trying to do something about it. The occasional feeble cry of 'keep it down' should achieve that, but won't quieten our young tribe - nothing short of strong drugs would, and they are not an option.

ADRIENNE SAYS: Chrysanthemums need to be kept in a cool, frost- free place so that the plants harden off ready for planting out in late May. Keep the plants watered and watch out for greenfly. To make it bushier with plenty of flowers, pinch out the growing tip to stimulate dormant side-shoots into action. Before planting outside, prepare the soil by digging in plenty of well-rotted manure or garden compost, and rake in a handful of Growmore fertiliser per sq m.

Author: Adrienne Wild