Dear readers, nobody loves you more than I. That’s right: nobody. And so it’s time once again for me to save your bacon by giving you a list of great Christmas presents you can buy on Christmas morning.
I mean, mere last-minute shopping is for wimps. If you’re a true pro, you don’t finish buying gifts until 10 minutes after Aunt Mimsy unexpectedly pulls into the driveway, and you tell the kids to keep singing “Jingle Bells” at her until mommy comes back downstairs.
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One of the great Christmas presents you can buy on Christmas morning: Netflix.
(AP file)
I have one rule: no gift certificates. Each gift has to be something the recipient can play with on Christmas, and which bamboozles them into thinking you put a lot of time into this.
• • You managed to gain permanent custody of a one-of-a-kind family photo. Many nearby drugstores have a Kodak Picturemaker kiosk, and they’re often open on Christmas. A quick errand can result in a handsome 5-by-7 duplicate of that tiny photo.
You can probably snag a nice wooden frame and be home before your guests arrive for dinner.
• • Yes, if you know that a kid has an iPod, or better yet is getting one from Santa, you can buy an online iTunes gift certificate. But go the extra mile and buy them a specific movie, TV series or album.
Download the iTunes desktop software from iTunes.com, browse until you find the perfect title, and pay online. The result will be an electronic certificate that allows the recipient to download that title free.
• • Your bread-and-butter last-second gifts will be subscriptions to online services.
My faves:
1.) The New York Times crossword is still the gold standard in proving to yourself that you’re nowhere near as smart as you think you are … and the daily puzzle is available to anyone who coughs up a quite affordable annual fee. Every day, your giftee can either solve the puzzle online, print it out, or download it, and solve it with a free desktop crossword app.
A year’s membership is $40 from www.nytimes.com/pages/cro sswords/.
2.) A few months ago, Marvel Comics put thousands of comic books online.
You type “Iron Man” into the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited Web site, and it returns comics pulled from its entire 40-year publishing history, all viewable as full-size comics pages right in the browser window. It’s $5 per month or $60 for the whole year.
To sign up, visit www.marvel.c om/digitalcomics/.
3.) A subscription to the Flickr online photo service is a great gift for anyone with a digital camera. Their friends and family will love it too, because it offers hands-down the simplest and most powerful tool for sharing photos.
It also organizes and backs up their photos safely on Flickr’s remote servers. Flickr costs just $25 for a year (www.flickr.com/gift/).
4.) Rhapsody music service is like having an insanely rich and generous friend next door who owns millions of music tracks. You can come over any time and listen to anything you want for as long as you want. He’ll even let you take CDs home with you.
Think “hear any album, song or custom playlist streamed straight from Rhapsody.com’s servers, through any Web browser” instead of “come over.”
Instead of “take CDs home with you,” read “download tracks to your Windows notebook or desktop, or sync to many pocket music players.”
Too bad it doesn’t work with iPods.
Go to www.real.com/gifts/rhapsody — a six-month prepaid membership is $70, or three months for $35.
There are services that will go you one further and lend you actual discs. Netflix and Gamefly are separate services, but they work on the same principle. Browse their online catalogs, and build a “wish list” of the DVDs and game titles you’d like to get. They immediately send you the first few items on your list (quantity is determined by your subscription plan).
Keep ‘em as long as you like. When you get tired of “The Godfather” (whether it’s the movie or the game), just send it back in a postpaid mailer, and the service sends you the next item on your list.
Rates vary, depending on how deeply you want your recipient to wallow in the trough.
Visit www.netflix.com/Gift and www.gamefly.com/giftcert/ for details and pricing.
Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun-Times.