The Dave Barry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

 Dave Barry... 2025...Gift Guide  

. . . "Do you have somebody on your holiday gift list who enjoys reading intellectually sophisticated, thought-provoking literature? This is not the gift for that person. This is for the person who would be amused by a can labeled FISH BALLS." . . .

   "Today we officially enter the holiday season, a very special time of year when we pause amid the frantic hustle and bustle of the “daily grind” to incur large amounts of consumer debt because we have to buy gifts for our loved ones to reciprocate for the gifts that they have to buy for us to reciprocate for the gifts that we are buying for them.

   "This is a tradition that dates back more than 2,000 years, to the time when the Three Wise Men traveled to an inn in Bethlehem to see the baby Jesus, who was staying with Mary and Joseph in the stable because Housekeeping was still working on their room. The New Testament tells us that Mary placed Jesus in a “manger,” which I always thought was just another word for “stable,” but I recently looked it up and it’s actually a feeding trough for livestock, which means — the New Testament does not state this explicitly, but it’s clearly implied — that the baby Jesus could have been accidentally eaten by a cow. So it had to have been an anxious time for Mary, a new mom exhausted from childbirth, having to fend off livestock, not to mention the annoying little boy who, according to the popular 347-minute Christmas song, showed up wanting to serenade her newborn infant by pounding on a drum." . . .

   "Thousands of years later, we’re still dealing with the stress of holiday gift-giving — the constant nagging worry that we won’t have enough gifts to retaliate against everybody who will be giving gifts to us. Wouldn’t it be great if you could drop out of this insane holiday competition? Well you can! The trick is to stop trying to give your loved ones thoughtful and appropriate gifts. Instead, you want to give them gifts that are so stupid or inappropriate that they will never want to exchange gifts with you again, and in fact may enter the Federal Witness Protection Program to avoid running that risk.

..."Where can you find gifts that bad? Right here, that’s where, in my annual Holiday Gift Guide. This is a carefully curated selection of real products that you can actually buy; in fact these products are all 100 percent tax-deductible if you write about them for business purposes in your professional humor Substack. So grab your credit card and prepare to be underwhelmed, because here comes this year’s lineup of gift candidates, starting with:"

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