But our point is that the Holiday Season is a time of traditions. And that is why every year, over the violent objections of our attorneys, we present our Holiday Gift Guide.

What is the Holiday Gift Guide? It is a collection of truly unique gifts -- gifts that will cause the people who open them to look at you and say, with heartfelt gratitude: ``OK, where's my real gift?''

How are we able to find gift concepts of this caliber? It is not easy. Every year, we conduct an exhaustive, in-depth, comprehensive, worldwide search of stuff we get in the mail. This search sometimes takes as long as 15 minutes, but we frankly believe that the results are worth it.

Once we have selected our gifts, we purchase them with our unlimited Gift Guide budget of almost $400. We then subject each gift to a rigorous field-testing procedure that involves opening the box, looking inside, and remarking: ``Can you believe THIS?''

We want to stress that all the items in the Gift Guide are real. We do not make them up. Somebody actually decided to manufacture and market these items, which means that you can actually buy them, assuming you have an even bigger egg nog problem than we do.

If you do buy a Gift Guide item, you may rest assured that your purchase is protected by an iron-clad warranty. This means that if, for any reason whatsoever, you are unhappy with your purchase, you are out of luck, because there is a big wad of iron surrounding your warranty. For all you know, there might not even be a warranty IN there. There might just be dead bugs.

But enough with the legal technicalities. It's time to unveil the 2001 Holiday Gift Guide lineup, starting with this year's ``top of the line'' item:

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