Here is a very efficient shopping method: Divide the amount of money you have by the number of people on your gift list to get an average dollar amount per person. So if you have $160, and you want to buy gifts for 10 people, your average is $16 per person. Now find something that costs $16, and buy 10 of whatever it is. You'll find many useful gifts in this price range; for example, you could get 10 family-sized bottles of vitamin B. Everyone, young and old alike, can use vitamin B, and your children are sure to shriek with delight when they find it under the tree.

If you want to buy gifts that are a little more personal, you should follow these guidelines:

Gifts for Men
Men are amused by almost any idiot thing - that is why professional ice hockey is so popular - so buying gifts for them is easy. But you should never buy them clothes. Men believe they already have all the clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous. For example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only three of them. He has learned, through humiliating trial and error, that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh at him ("You're not going to wear THAT tie with that suit, are you?"). So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several years without being laughed at. If you give him a new tie, he will pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you.

If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires. More than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set of tires.

Gifts for Women
Again, you should avoid buying clothes, but not because women don't like clothes. The problem is sizes. First of all, women's clothing sizes don't mean anything. Suppose you're looking at a dress, and the tag says it's a size 14. You could measure that dress with every known measuring instrument, checking for every known unit of measurement, and you would never find any dimension that was 14 anythings long. Not only that, but you would never find any dimension that corresponded to the same dimension on any other size-14 dress. Not only that, but chances are you would never find any woman in the entire world who would admit to being a size 14.

Another problem is color. Women do not see color the way men do. Suppose several women are in a paint store, looking at a sample of orange paint. The paint-can label may say "orange," and the paint may appear obviously orange to a male, but the women will never use the word "orange" to describe it. They will say things like: "It has a lot of blue" or "It's much too gray." Don't ask me to explain it. All I know is, if a woman tells a man she'd like a green scarf for Christmas, he'll go out and buy a scarf that he believes to be green, based on his concept of "green," which he got from crayons in the second grade. She will look at the scarf as if it were covered with maggots, then show it to her friends and say: "I asked Harold for a green scarf, and just look at what he got me." They'll all have a good laugh, and she'll return it.

So the safest gifts for women are expensive little bottles of colorless liquids, which are sold at cosmetic counters under names such as "Eau de Water" and "Endless Night of Heavy Petting."

Gifts for Children
This is easy. You never have to figure out what to get for children, because they will tell you exactly what they want. They spend months and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday-morning cartoon-show advertisements. Make sure you get your children exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices. If your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You Can Rip Right Off, you'd better get it. You may be worried that it might help to encourage your child's antisocial tendencies, but believe me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you've seen a child who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift.